Sadly I think you'll be waiting forever. The market share is too small. If you want the best in class you need to run Windows 7 now and Windows 8 next year (it seems that for traders W8 will mainly be a slightly cleaned up version of w7 - my impression so far). Macs don't offer the breadth of application support and suffer from Steve J's control the user mentality. I tried about 7 linux distros and I just kept coming up against the performance being slightly under Win XP 32. Mainly on graphics (yep, just the 2d graphics we do for trading), wine, and applications that were not as fast as the windows equivalents. So I paid up for W7 x64 Home Premium and it was same or faster than XP on the things I was testing. I have tried W8 but at this stage there is an issue with some of the autohotkey functionality that I rely on for trading so I'll try again when it goes beta. TWS, Sierra Chart, browsers, Open Office etc all worked fine. Memory use was also lighter than 7.
Windows 8 late this year or early next? Doesn't matter, will have to wait for SP 1 first. Agree on SJ and it's getting worse with their "one fits all" stick head in proverbial place attitude. If your demands are not too high Win 7 natively on a Mac mini server is bliss. Three screens and next to no noise at all. Best wishes for 2012 John. Xena
out of curiosity what hardware are you running W8 DP on? I'm having driver issues with a lot of the Dell stuff. Can't get it to do a full install on some of the stuff with ECC RAM and built-in RAID/storage controllers. Have you ditched Aero and the tiles yet?
kiwi trader, Thank you for your informative comments on the use comparison of linux and Win7. I have tried several linux versions and like you I have yet to find adequate long-term operating system version support, hardware support, printer support, or software support to do the things a trader needs. I really expect to be upgrading to Win7 or a later Win OS when Win 2K can no longer get the job done. I think the only reason Win 2K is still usable is Win 2K is similar in structure to Win XP 32 bit which is still used and supported by many.
My hardware is simple (intel, gigabyte boards, 8G ram, SSD, Disk, no raid, no ecc so really your target "home" system). I turned aero off in w7 so it was off for 8 too - the tiles will be interesting for tablets but I just clicked the one that takes it to a normal interface and stay in that zone. Once I'd worked out that there was a problem with autohotkey as I use it I dumped it to let everyone catch up. I was pleased that it used less memory than my (stripped slightly) version of W7 home premium. So, when the beta is out I'll probably do a build on that and see if I can get everything I use going. I will figure out how to remove the tiles from my pc version (saw a hack for that already). Agree about quiet systems. Big fanless heatsinks on gpu and cpu and some quiet Noctua fans to blow some air around the case. Really looking forward to getting a i7 3700 mid year and building a new quiet system around it. Might consider ECC ram but won't go raid as I dont need it. On the SP1, I probably wont bother waiting. If the beta is stable I'll just go 8 all the way ... drop it if it shows issues ... but I think its just a minor evolution of 7 for the pc world if you turn off the eye candy and don't use the new disk format.
Don't even recall the 400 having a real keyboard, but only a membrane one. Might have been diff versions.