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At 6:03 PM -0700 3/23/02, Gary Fritz wrote:
>Certainly I would never trust this thing to real trading. And it's
>not worth it to dedicate a separate box to it just so it doesn't get
>its knickers in a twist. Even if I had it running on its own box, if
>it's *that* sensitive to any minor addition to the system, who knows
>when it might lose its marbles because I sneezed or something? I
>need solid, reliable software for my trading. Not some pollyanna
>that I can't trust. Too bad.
I have TradeStation 2000i systems running on Win2K with very few
problems. While not the most stable product I have ever seen <g>, it
is good enough such that I have just about quit using TradeStation
4.0. Some things I have found helpful:
I did learn not to put anything on the system that doesn't really
need to be there. For example, I tried some application that was
supposed to kill pop-up windows in Internet Explorer and my system
got very unstable. This helps confirm that many (or most?) of these
add-ins are very poorly written and tested, at least on Win2K.
Never run public domain shareware and applications from small
software companies on your TradeStation machine unless you really
have to. (There is no way these can be thoroughly tested on all the
various operating system configurations today.)
Now I have just TS2000i, Microsoft Office, ZoneAlarm and Norton
SystemWorks running and most all of the unneeded processes such as
"fast-find" turned off. Even in SystemWorks, you should turn off all
running processes except the virus checker. And never run stuff like
Speed Disk - the Win2K defrag utility is safer. WinDoctor finds bad
stuff frequently so I run it perhaps once a week.
Get a copy of TaskInfo, look at all the processes, and kill all the
extra ones that start automatically and waste cycles.
Get a copy of Ad-aware and run it once a week. It will get rid of all
the "spyware" stuff that gets into the system. Some of these can
cause instabilities.
And keep all of these up-to-date by checking for updates at least
once a month.
On a machine connected to a real-time data feed, you can kill
TradeStation at night, leaving the Global Server running to collect
data. I have had TradeStation crashes at night occasionally for some
unknown reason. This machine is dedicated to running only
TradeStation real-time.
Machines are now so cheap that you should use a dedicated one for
critical processes. Get a keyboard/video switch and use one keyboard
and monitor for several machines. That way you can start a process,
such as an optimization run on one machine and then switch to another
machine for email, web browsing, etc.
I have a separate "general purpose" machine that I use for other
miscellaneous stuff, trying new software, etc. It still runs Windows
98 since almost everything runs and is pretty well tested on that.
That machine has dozens of programs on it, most of which I tried
once or twice and never use any more.
With a 100MHz network and an Ethernet switch, you can remote-mount a
directory from a file-server machine on all other machines to be able
to transfer files quickly between machines.
Get a UPS to prevent problems with power glitches. They are very
cheap insurance and prevent file corruption if the power fails during
a critical operation.
And, VERY IMPORTANT, if TradeStation quits or terminates abnormally,
be sure to kill any TradeStation processes that are still running. It
leaves some running when it dies. Either restart the machine or kill
the processes with the Task Manager. This can be a major source of
instability.
Granted, life would be a lot easier if Omega ever learned how to
build stable software...
Bob Fulks
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