None of those processes are hogging your CPU, so I don't think there's anything you can do to pick up speed significantly... unless you want to go for a more high powered machine all around.... and that may only speed things up a little.
I agree with gnome. Might try moving msn, order entry and browsing off to a different pc. I do those things on a laptop during trading hours so my main machine can do the heavy lifting with less on it to service. The one thing I do notice is the esignal. When I use to use them the software could bring up cpu usage tremdously, like upto 90% under market activity. Switched to Ensign in my case and the problem went away. Bsulli
during the day keep the taksmanager open on the process tab and watch the individual processes to see which ones climb the highest. That will give you a much better idea on which app to focus on. Bsulli
for the average pc, cpu usage is high when doing disk i/o stuff... or when a particular task isnt hardware accelerated, such as viewing a dvd or listening to music.... most likely one of ur applications has a bug that loops the cpu imo
It's most likely Excel that's taking a lot of cycles. I suggest using the Task Manager, Rick click on Excel and lower the priority just one level. For all practical purposes Excel will run at full speed and the rest will get priority. This will mostly likely give you a more responsive system. I would also recommend going to 2 GB since you have Xeon's. XP does funny things with caches and memory buffers, not all of which show up in the task managers memory usage. You have a very nice system and it should be able to do what you're describing.
Curious... what is ATIMMC and why is your Internet Explorer using up so much memory? Are you using a browser based quote system? I have tried the suggestion to reduce the priority of Excel before because I was using it for my fast cash on the FDAX with DDE to CQG. That was a mistake in my case.... my fast cash became 60+ second cash. Worth a try though.
my guess is that ATIMMC is an ATI app of some sort. hth take care omni edit: here is a link i found re: ATIMMC ... http://www.ati.com/products/multimediacenter/
If it goes in bursts and then the CPU goes back down it is your I/O subsystem cannot handle the amount of data you are processing and DDE is chocking on "fast" markets. There are right ways to research the problem and wrong ways to do it, but blindly getting a faster machine is the wrong first step. If you are in Chicago, PM me and I can help. nitro