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ok per requests, here are a few pointers on building a trading machine from scratch.
- get a case with at least 300W power supply, i recommend at
least one extra intake fan. make sure the case/motherboard is
enabled for sleep or hibernate modes, in which case you can save
energy and your hard drives from spinning all the time...
also make sure you keyboard allows one touch power, sleep, wake up
interface with mobo and powersupply, have to check three things for
that: power supply, mobo and keyboard all three must be enabled
for various power saving modes.
- preferably get a well known Intel chipset board, you can of course
go with AMD board but make sure you get a stable chipset.
you can find out about all mobo problems on www.motherboards.org
website. motherboard IS the key component!!!
- processor speed IS NOT that important for trading, most of you trade
1-5 markets intraday and 1Ghz machine is plenty... don't waste 10K on
a super machine that will go obsolete in one year... unless of course
you are trading most world markets on 1 min charts with autoexecution :)
- memory, get at least 256M but better 512M is plenty to run tradestation,
when the market load goes up on some news event 512 should be plenty
to handle those fast market ticks... memory size is more important than
processor speed, a known fact.
- get two equal size hard drives, use one a back up with duocor, THE ONLY
way to go when trading... with duocor you can be back up and running
in under 1-3 minutes if you main drive fails. use removable trays for both
master drive and slave drives, so you can swap the drives without opening
the case ( if bios boot hd selection option is not avail ) make sure the case has enough
5' bays to accommodate your 2 hds + CD + whatever. don't use crapware back up
such as ghost, drive image, etc .... it is CRAP... amateur ware...
- many of you on the list go to extremes when selecting video cards... big mistake
unless you are a gamer you don't need fancy video for trading... you need a basic
dual 2D AGP card or a couple of single cards will do the same, unless you a running
something like 100 charts at on one frigging giant screen...
- get at least 17' flat screens, else you face will burn from heat and radiation,
monitors - that's where you want to invest your money, not the machine...
- basic on board sound is all you need, not a friggin 3D 5 channel surround sound
TS new order beep... if you are a high resolution trader ( 1min -5 min ) and need to
use the crapper ( that maybe outside if you are backwoods trailer trader ) and want to hear the
alerts at same time then get a speaker / cordless
phone combination, place base phone near computer speaker, page the condless
part, you can now hear the speaker alert sound through the cordless phone which
you should take with you to the crapper. alternatively use baby monitor...
( i have one extra for sale if someone wants it :-) ), else you have to pump the volume
up so that you could hear the alert from the crapper which might be detremental to
the process itself or scare the s...t out of you while you are doing it, your wife or you dog,
comes from personal experience... don't repeat others mistakes...
yet another alternative is wiring a crapper with a speaker or taking it at the desk... joking of course.
( by the way using a baby monitor/ cordless phone comes handy when finding a sattelite
on a dish by a beep, you figure the rest )
- if you want to get a CD burner, make sure there are no known issues with
motherboards and OS... check BEFORE you buy... same goes for DVD.
if you plan to use DVD drive to watch movies after market then pay attention
to your video card selection,
basic might not do there, but still you only need 2D card but with extra memory,
make sure it's compatible with the DVD drive. no need to get super 3D ultrafast
$300 video cards for chart trading...total waste of resources.
- don't try to come up with a machine for trading and playing games at same time...
gamer machines must have different configurations, more power, etc...
- use w2k OS, this is the professionals OS, Xp is not needed... but is ok.
what is important is you
make sure you understand windows restore and basic troubleshooting concepts such as:
recovery consol and its commands, erd back up disk, how to handle lock ups and freezes,
hd repair and maintenance and what to do if you get a virus ( if you run an antivirus pack
and duocor with ERD then you should never get hit ), w2k boot options,
get a manual for w2k, install recover consol boot option, always use ERD disk, get duocor
and on-track virus and system pack and use it wisely...
- last and not least, every time TS upgrade comes out do a full back up, then install then
check for a couple of days then back up again... the same with other software or hardware
additions/changes.
- after you build you machine, burn it for at least 24 hours in dos.
- don't install ANY third party crapware/shareware/freeware from download.com...
only the ones that widely used...such as winzip, hypersnap, acrobat, a lot of the
ware from there is spyware or trojanware, especially gnutela type ware... stay away
unless you want somebody to have access to your machine while you are away...
or use dedicated machine for the non critical tasks...
- get at least a 500W UPS back up, but make sure you understand that most
backup will not protect from power spikes ( there 3 types of power problems:
spikes due to lightning - EMP, burnouts - short duration power loss and blackouts )
that will reset you machine even if it's on UPS when EMP spike comes ( Florida and
other lighting prone states ), but will usually take care of burnouts and short blackouts,
else gotta ground both the machine and ups...
- if you are privacy or big brother freak( we all should be now since 911 ) then must get something
like secure tunneling pack for e-mail and browsing... check with www.freedom.net or anonymiser
although no mention of secure tunneling on freedom anymore.
also get a Nat hardware firewall.
anybody knows if pop. secure tunneling packages have back doors to kar-ni-vo-r please let me know?
i e-mailed the dos burn utility to traders2traders, get it there.
bilo.
ps. how to build a test machine:
- if you are a beginner developer than you can need a test machine to test you software
and OS. well there is a very simple way of building a test machine from you main machine.
get a extra hard drive, put it in a removable tray, install whatever OS you want to test on it
and simply replace you test hard drive with working hard drive - you just got yourself a
test machine without buying it... you can then screw with the test hard drive all you want,
drop it, burn it, infest it with whatever bugs,spyware and viruses you want, reformat it, etc... test what
you want on it, without buying a separate machine just for that... plus the rest of the hardware
stays the same so you can test basically on the same hardware configuration...very convenient.
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