Perfect summation. Kudos. If I might add, having several trading computers also makes sense if one is tracking more than 20 symbols. While you can have multiple monitor setups, you want as much processing power devoted optimally to a handful of symbols and their associated analysis.
Syswizard, thanks for the info. I suppose another option might be to manually turn off some of the supporting processes (if possible) in XP or Vista. I think one of the PC mags has an article this or last month on how to do it.