Windows Vista... 2 thumbs down

[keymoo]

Yeah notouch on my trading machine i use the classic windows desktop as it not only is less distracting, you get slightly more screen space as the start bar and title bars require less space.

[cooter]

	Quote:	notouch
	Windows 2000 is supported for another 3 years yet. I have an old laptop with a Celeron 500 and 64MB of RAM running Windows 2000 and it's amazing how well it runs - very stable. You can make Windows XP look identical to Windows 2000 by switching to classic windows desktop. I think it looks a lot better than the kiddie-looking XP default.

Since when? Case in point:

The recent update for the change in Daylight Savings Time. Guess which fix would NOT work with Windows 2000 machines?

I thought I heard that Win2K (on SP6 or so, now) was declared to be at the end of its support life. If you can get decent support and drivers for Win2K, by all means, go for it.

It's more stable than XP, and actually faster, because of the lower overhead. I'm think of actually going BACK to Win2K, just to see if Tradestation will run any faster or smoother with it.

[Reaver]

Yes, frankly- it sucks.

It just freezes up for no reason whatsoever. All the browsers (IE/Firefox) will just sh*t the bed for no reason for 5-10 minutes. Brand new computer Dual Core, all that jazz.

[james_gsx]

We have a laptop with Vista, we brought it into Best Buy today and asked them to put XP back on.

I have office 2007, it sucks. I can't find half the things I want and the help feature blows.

My next trading PC will have windows XP no doubt, my biggest pet peeve is slow computers. My next laptop will be a mac, and all I will do with it is mess around online, nothing big.

[Soultrader]

hehehe... I bought myself a laptop also. Using Vista with Office 2007! I use it for entertainment purposes so its okay but for trading it would be a piece of crap. I think Windows XP classic default is the best way to go.

[Rich]

Bought a Mac for my daughter, I'm SICK of Gates and won't give him another penney!
The unit works flawlessly right out of the box, no worries of viruses and the programs are EASIER than ANY windows based or Office based programs.

How is Mac with trading ???

[Reaver]

	Quote:	TinGull
	*whispers* get a mac.....get a mac........

ha ha leave it to you to step in on mac's behalf!

But I'll have to say I am leaning that way myself, man.

[PYenner]

Vista Home OS uses 1Gb of ram, trading platforms use nearly 1Gb so a 2GB Vista computer is just too small to run a single platform.

Recently got a 4GB computer with Vista Home and a faster than average processor and it runs MT4 at least 4 times faster (visually) than the 2GB XP computer.

Up to a few months ago I could run the live account plus two MT4 demo accounts on the 2GB XP computer but the MT4 rebuilds seem to be making it more and more resource hungry. It is now so slow that I get "invalid price" when running just one MT4 demo plus the live account when prices start moving fast.

Hence the shift to 4GB plus fast processor and I actually like Vista despite a very long term loathing for M$ and Win, bottom line is that it finally seems to work for me. Never thought I would be saying that.

I think with Vista, you have to spend the money, budget computers will not be good enough anymore.

Task Manager does not seem to fully report ram usage, I get the impression it ignores swap file and handle impact on memory usage. Charts use handles and handles use memory. XP seems to run out of memory when Task Manager says it has 1/4 to 1/2GB spare. "Disk Full" is the message XP gives me when it runs out of ram and can no longer allocate file handles for the word processor that serves as a journal, good old M$ sigh.

Incidently a 20" widescreen monitor set to high definition is brilliant if you use lotsa charts but you need a graphics card with its own ram, avoid the budget approach that has graphics sharing system ram.

[TinGull]

Rich, I use a 20inch iMac for my trading and love it...for the most part. I run Parallels to execute trades via TransAct and as for charting....it's really tough. I've finally come to a point where I think I need to go to the windows side of my Mac for all my trading stuff, and then at the end of the day switch back to sanity land.

[Reaver]

Man last night my computer (Vista) kept freezing up. I swear I was about to go off in the woods and blow my brains out! It is frustrating as all get out when that happens. Does anyone know what may be causing my browsers (I try IE and FF and they both screw up) to freeze all the time? Is it just glitches or is there parhaps another reason this is occuring?