Thanks. have been told the same; that's why I didnt buy a new pc yet. Have to upgrade also to OS X 10.4 next week and see how it goes.
Depends on the software you use, the studies running in that software and the amount of markets watched. I watch about 30 Markets and have an average of 4 charts per Market. Now not all of them are open at the same time but when I have multiple Markets open I NEED to know I have the CPU and Memory available not to tax my machine and push my trading platform to lag. That is money in the bank and I don't gamble with that. My main travel laptop is a P4 3.8 with 2 gig of memory & running Win XP Pro and it peaks at about 20 charts. My home system is a monster AMD Dual Core 4800+ with 2 gig of memory & running Win XP 64 and it peaks at about 80 charts. During the spike on the Fed report today I had about 10 charts open on my laptop along with J-Trader and peaked at about 70% usage. My memory usage in both machines bumps 90% on occasion and both of those machines are naked but for trading environments. My philosophy is that if I am going to trade for a living then my "tool" of the trade is going to be the best and most stable it can be. $2000 for a monster PC or $1500 for a monster laptop is a tiny tiny tiny price to pay for the piece of mind and stability of your earning environment.
the new version of tradestation ran extremely well today, now that i think of it i didn't notice a single latency was also the first fed day i believe since the globex data format change
The Java command line switch for Windows you are thinking of is probably this -Dsun.java2d.noddraw=true which turns off use of Direct Draw. There are a couple of others listed towards the end of this document http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/2D/perf_graphics.html
True, but there are some mac specific options for Java2D graphics that you can probably find by googling. I've no idea whether they would have any effect, beneficial or otherwise, on running TWS.