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Tim,
The Appian Graphics card is an ideal choice for someone looking to add
multiple monitors to a single PC. I want to consolidate my PC's/Monitors
and I will use the Appian. I have heard nothing but good things about it.
I know that Dell and Appian have teamed up. Another reason why I like
Appian is because it has the support of Dell. Generally, I believe its
best to buy what what everybody else is buying and Dell's support is an
indicator of what others are buying. Supporting the product is easier this
way. Resale is also better.
The card costs $500 and supports, I believe 4 or 8 monitors. I would call
the company and ask them these questions. They know Tradestation well.
Go to www.appiantech.com. Their web page should answer most of your
questions. The card works by treating your combined monitor screen space
as one big virtual screen. Your mouse travels over one big desktop from
monitor to monitor.
As far as compatibility goes, NT and TS4 work a helluvalot better together
than TS4 and Win95. Reference some of my past posts regarding NT, 95 and
TS4. TS4 runs extremely stable under NT. You could leave your machine on
for days, even weeks and TS would run without a problem (ie GPF). Try
doing that with Win95. Most people can't. Most people would be lucky to
get 2 consecutive days of uninterrupted data collection. What this means
is that with NT, you can go on vacation and know that barring an unusual
event, you will have an accurate data record. It also means that when you
wake up in the morning, your data will be there waiting for you to trade.
With Win95 you could almost bet you wouldn't have a complete data record.
All of my trading machines use NT. I inisit on it and always will. I
would highly recommend that you convert to NT. FutureSource feed and any
of their software should work with NT. Their ads say that the software
they sell is NT4 compatible. There's no reason why the feed shouldn't work
too. It couldn't hurt to ask FutureSoruce though just to be 100% sure. If
their feed wasn't compatible with NT, they would loose a lot of business.
If they're not, I'd have serious reservations about using them. You want
your datafeed company to be cutting edge, and if they don't support NT,
they're floundering in the dark ages. NT is the wave of the future and is
the best (reliable, supported, etc) OS on the market today. By switching
to NT now you will be learning the OS that Microsoft plans to make their
sole OS around 2000-2001.
The only downside to switching to NT I experienced was the learning curve
of installation. NT takes considerably longer to install than Win95. The
first time I installed NT, it took 3 days (16 hours or so) to get the right
configuration with TS and my other software. The second time it only took
5 hours!
My advice, pay someone $50/hr to come out and install it for you. Develop
a realtionship with this person, the way you would develop a relationship
with your broker. Call him whenever you have a problem. This will not
only solve your problems faster than doing it yourself, but you'll learn
faster too -- as opposed to learning it from a book.
I would also suggest networking all of your PC's together so you can easily
access files between them. All of this should take 2-3 hours. Once you
get it set up then it's a matter of maintenance every 3-6 months that
shouldn't take more than 1-2 hours.
In summary, I believe Tradestation runs much better in NT than Win95. I
know for a fact that it runs more reliably which means I can trade everyday
without worrying about whether my data is complete or not. I don't believe
that TS performance is signficantly hindered by NT due to it's 16-32bit
conversion. I've run both systems and I haven't seen any performance
degredation in NT.
Good Luck,
Brian
PS: I enjoyed reading the post about how you deal with brokers.
-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Morge [SMTP:tmorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, April 24, 1998 8:03 PM
To: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx; ati@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Two monitors
Can anyone give me advice for video card products to look at that will
support
two 21 inch monitors? I am running a new Dell 400 mghzt Pentium II with 256
meg
ram and Win95. Dell suggested WinNT and the Appian card but I have no
history
with WinNT and I'd like to stay with Win95 unless someone can make me feel
confident that Tradestation and WinNT and FutureSource will all like each
other.
Anyway, what graphics cards are out there that people use that support two
or
more screens? And do you just tab between one program on one screen and
another
program on the other screen using the same keyboard? Is this a function of
the
graphics card you select or does it take additional software?
Thanks in advacne for ideas and help.
Tim Morge
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