Best computer Operating System for Trading?

Which is the best Operating System for Trading ( for Individuals )?
Please give your opinions.
Windows platforms are slow and sluggish when it comes to real data crunching and multiple tasking like opening two chart platforms at a time and testing/validating a strategy, even with 2gb RAM and Intel Intel Core2 Quad processor .

For my charting PC's I use Quad core Xeon Z600's with 16G of RAM and W7.

One little trick for freeing up processor power in MT4 is going to your data screen right click and select "hide all" that will stop drawing data of your feed for charts you are not interested in.

I've got an AMD quad core Phenom II 955 BE, overclocked to 3.6ghz, with 8gb ram. I do a lot of testing, everything from proprietary platforms and data stores to MT4 and public data.

I'm running linux (ubuntu 10.04), with virtualbox. MT4 by itself does not do a good job of using multiple cores, so if you want to take advantage of that it helps to have some layer of abstraction. Vbox abstracts out the IO calls, so disk writes occur on a separate core. In vbox I have XP and win 7. I've found that win 7 is a little slower than XP in this situation.

Most of the proprietary platforms I have will spawn multiple processes. So I have them compiled for linux. I've got one that does one process for the trade API interface, and separate processes for each instrument being watched. I wish MT4 did that.

I have no problems testing strategy. The only problem comes with MT4 when I've got a lot of data imported, and I've got a lot of pairs open. That sucks up a lot of CPU and a god-awful amount of ram. Fortunately I have both, but I still find myself closing heavy charts when they're not needed.

When the 6 core chip drops to a price I find attractive, I might upgrade to that. I would also love a way to bind multiple cores into one virtual core, but I haven't seen a good way to do that yet.

Any newer computer has plenty of power no matter what OS you use. I've got 6 x 22" monitors running off 3 video cards on Windows 7 64bit and my I5-750 cpu doesn't even break a sweat.

That's because your video cards do the work there. If you have a lot of data imported into MT4 and load several of those charts, it can max out the ram on a smaller machine.

Windows based platforms are not good IMO, but since others like Linux are not that popular ,so shifting to non-windows would be with lot of skepticism.But I still frown on windows , but still use it.
Can anyone help with the basic requirements/steps etc to shift to another non-windows based OS?
For chips IMO, AMD phenom does a better job compared to Intel.
Individuals going for cloud computing would pricey, IMO.

Windows still wins the "most things operate on it" war.

It is also very stable unless an application plays up ... so if you are disciplined it is likely to be solid.

So, until you have a reason to go elsewhere (and you don't seem to have one yet) then you're going to be better off sticking with windows. Get the other stuff right and then mess around with OS's.

XP or Win 7 are likely to be fine. If you are going to use lots of ram then Win 7 x64 to allow you full access to it.

awaiting for Google to take Windows head on, there by ending windows monopoly.

I use Windows 7 pro. I had Vista for a bit and that OS was complete garbage. running a quad core intel CPU, 4GB of ram and a 8800GTX video card by EVGA. I built mine a long time ago, sad to see the hardware in my PC is like 50%+ less than when i bought them lol

Unless you want to write and use the latest algorithm (for which one would have to spend quite some money on software alone), its all irrelevant.

The market principles have not changed since the first PC was used for trading.

As long as you know where you want to buy/sell, any off the shelf laptop will do.

regards
daytrading

Anyone here tried the Linux based OS, like Ubuntu etc?

As I said earlier, yes.

You only really have (3) choices:

Windows - MOST trading platforms are native to the WIN32 OS

Mac OSX - Java based trading platforms will operate on as well as some WIN32 platforms with specialty software.

Linux (any variant) - Same as OSX.

It's not a matter of "what's best", but what you prefer. I've used all three and each one has it's own ups/downs.

the best imo now is WINXP 64bit PRO

why xp ?

coz many platforms are not ready for win7
vista is one big crap so xp or win7

2nd thing xp is now very safe platform with no backdoors ect.

in few days i will test server 2008 core instalation so extremly fast

windows is fine for trading. If you trade 100000 of markets with 10000 of windows and charts opened all the time, then I would go for linux, but i doubt that you trade that way

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