What Processor Power do you need to run FAPS or TURBO?

[Nelstradamus]

My dedicated trade station (which is running 24/7) is a Sony Vaio Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz with 1Gb RAM (Ram is maxed out at 1 Gb :mad:) Windows XP. This thing runs like a 3 legged dog...meaning doggy and choppy slow.

When I started this whole process I re-imaged my hard drive like it was brand new and removed a ton of extra apps that I won't need, did a defrag and Crap cleaner.

I run a Live account on FAPS and Demo account on FAP TURBO and when checking the processes in Windows Task Manager the program terminal.exe hogs up upwards of 780,000k of memory (remember I only have 1Gb to begin with). The mouse freezes up for 3 seconds at a time and same when switching back and forth between charts and MT4 apps.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I'm wondering if a NON Duo Core chip is the problem here. My Alien gaming system, smoking fast, has no problems running mulitple MT4 apps but the thing's is louder than a jet airplane and there's no way I could sleep in the same room with the thing.

Let me know what kind of crappy machine you're running on successfully. I don't need to hear about the smoking machines, just the crappy ones because that's what I'm stuck with.

Thanks for your input.

[oofdah]

As an IT professional, my first suggestion would obviously be to upgrade your RAM. However, you said your RAM is maxed out at 1GB. I would double check on that. A typical Pentium 4 motherboard can address far more RAM than 1 GB. Your RAM slots may be full, but you could always buy bigger sticks ;)

2 GHz should be fast enough to run faps and backtests assuming you have no other TSR programs running. Run MSCONFIG and disable crap you don't need - including all the Sony junk that comes preloaded on those things.

My next suggestion would be to drop a few hundred bucks @ tigerdirect and pick up a nice dual core PC. They have plenty of refurbished dual core machines with 2+ GB RAM for $3-$500. Don't sweat the "refurbished" label - I order them ALL the time, and probably 1/100 had issues that required a return, and they do have a 90 day factory warranty.

[Sooner]

My dedicated trade station (which is running 24/7) is a Sony Vaio Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz with 1Gb RAM (Ram is maxed out at 1 Gb :mad:) Windows XP. This thing runs like a 3 legged dog...meaning doggy and choppy slow.

When I started this whole process I re-imaged my hard drive like it was brand new and removed a ton of extra apps that I won't need, did a defrag and Crap cleaner.

I run a Live account on FAPS and Demo account on FAP TURBO and when checking the processes in Windows Task Manager the program terminal.exe hogs up upwards of 780,000k of memory (remember I only have 1Gb to begin with). The mouse freezes up for 3 seconds at a time and same when switching back and forth between charts and MT4 apps.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I'm wondering if a NON Duo Core chip is the problem here. My Alien gaming system, smoking fast, has no problems running mulitple MT4 apps but the thing's is louder than a jet airplane and there's no way I could sleep in the same room with the thing.

Let me know what kind of crappy machine you're running on successfully. I don't need to hear about the smoking machines, just the crappy ones because that's what I'm stuck with.

Thanks for your input.

You can also reduce the number of bars in the chart which will reduce your RAM usage. I have found that back testing can cause the RAM usage to get a little out of hand, repeated back testing has seen one instance of terminal.exe eat up about 1.3 gigs of RAM on my machine. Try reducing the bar count and more RAM is always a good idea. Even if you have to remove the RAM you have in there, unless the machine is fairly old (5+ years) then you might be better off investing in a VPS service to run it on.

[alan]

My dedicated trade station (which is running 24/7) is a Sony Vaio Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz with 1Gb RAM (Ram is maxed out at 1 Gb :mad:) Windows XP. This thing runs like a 3 legged dog...meaning doggy and choppy slow.

When I started this whole process I re-imaged my hard drive like it was brand new and removed a ton of extra apps that I won't need, did a defrag and Crap cleaner.

I run a Live account on FAPS and Demo account on FAP TURBO and when checking the processes in Windows Task Manager the program terminal.exe hogs up upwards of 780,000k of memory (remember I only have 1Gb to begin with). The mouse freezes up for 3 seconds at a time and same when switching back and forth between charts and MT4 apps.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? I'm wondering if a NON Duo Core chip is the problem here. My Alien gaming system, smoking fast, has no problems running mulitple MT4 apps but the thing's is louder than a jet airplane and there's no way I could sleep in the same room with the thing.

Let me know what kind of crappy machine you're running on successfully. I don't need to hear about the smoking machines, just the crappy ones because that's what I'm stuck with.

Thanks for your input.

Sounds to me like you have a memory leak on your hands. There is NO reason why MT4 should consume 750 MB of RAM. Completely remove your MT4 platform reinstall. See if that helps. If not it may be something with your Windows XP install. A fresh CLEAN not imaged with no apps Win XP SP2 install is a good idea. Fine tune your system services so you aren't loading a lot of crap at startup and DO NOT load a lot of system tray apps or run Norton or some other bloated and ineffective antivirus (Get AVG - it's free).

Your machine should have enough horsepower to run faps and fapturbo and way more. On average the max that MT4 should consume with that setup is 13-80 MB. As an idea my largest MT4 session consumes 27 MB.