I'm quite ignorant on this subject having never used one. My question is: Would it be possible to run all my trading apps off of a USB device? I'll be moving into a shared office space environment and even though I will have my own "office" complete with locking door, I still have some reservations about leaving my PC unattended. If I could just take my programs with me, security probably wouldn't be an issue even if my PC get's ripped off or broken into. Is this possible?
sure... just make sure your program doesn't install things into the windows directory. most are "portable" "security"? what happense if you lose your flash drive? you're not secure either way. so, why bother? change your password everyday if you like.
http://www.addonics.com/products/enclosures/ use one of these , take the drive with trading info home and bring it to work , make an extra backup copy for a safe place while your at it. Update the backup once a week. edit: remember when the guy made you get back up on the beam when you slipped, he knew it was now or never, you have the right notion moving forward, those who don't during these fast changing times will lose. Learnig the tools of the trade is mandatory, witness your excursion into video card hell, lol. Kudos on pressing on.
Thanks. I'll be sharing space with computer techies. I don't know'em yet so I don't trust'em. Plus, I'll be there from 3:00am to about noon. Lots of time for clowns to mess with my crap during their normal working hours. I'm thinking to take very good care of that device. * Thanks Banjo
beside Trade Station insists on installing itself on the main hard drive, I was able to install other applications on USB drive and run them from there so it depend on application. But sometimes they run kind of jerky, not a perfect solution.
If your concern is that folks are going to mess up your hardware then go the external drive route (you still need to make backups). If, however, your concern is privacy then get PGP desktop 9.x and use their whole disk encryption with the USB authentication token. On newer computers, the extra delay in encrypting/decrypting the harddrive is imperceptible so shouldn't matter for most (but not all) trading applications. -eLindy