just started a recently trading at home, using fidelity active trader. Might go work at a prop shop,but that is besides the point. Sometimes my system freezes up when involved in a trade. Just wanted to know what everyone thought should be my minimum RAM? and memory. any answers will be much appreciated.
ram today cost close to nothng..2Gb cost like $20,sometimes 10 AR.so correct aswer will be -the more,the better. but...you need to know, how much your motherbard can handle. and what type..never used older ram cost more..also-depends on your operating system..XP for example can't handle more than 3GB. if you put 4Gb it will show 3.25gb
Sounds like the culprit is something other than "not enough RAM".... but adding RAM is simple and cheap... easy to eliminate that as the cause if using WinXP OS.
To say that "sometimes my computer freezes up while I'm in a trade" is like saying that a million different things could be going on... it depends on lots of other variables and information that you haven't provided... especially considering the fact that you're using Fidelity. Could be you're running out of memory and the OS is thrashing the HD... could be the CPU is running high... could be that you're losing internet connectivity intermittently and the web page or program is non-responsive while its trying to reconnect and its just giving the appearance of the computer freezing up... could be your firewall or anti-virus software... could be anything. If you really want help, you need to start with what kind of computer configuration you're talking about... is this a recreational family computer used by lots of people with a million different programs running in the background or is this a dedicated trading computer with nothing else running? What are its specs? What other programs are running? And what have you done already to try to narrow down the list of possible culprits so we don't suggest things you've already ruled out as improbable?
I'm an IT guy and started with desktop support way back when. I say 4 GB should be the standard for a current workstation. You will need a 64 bit OS to utilize all that mem though. I recommend you download Windows 7 beta (very solid) if you already don't have a 64 bit OS. I have been pleasantly surprised by it. It is what Vista should have been from the beginning.
thx for the answers, let me first say I'm pretty computer illiterate not that you haven't already noticed that. I have upgraded my ram as i found out i wasn't even running enough for the program specs. This is my home computer, but i'm barely running any programs on it. I'll update tommorrow and let you know how it went.
you may also try something really basic-like defragment your hard drive,disk clean up(those are windows utilities)