G4 Imac Lagging horribly with my stock brokers' software.

Question

I use Scottrade and Interactivebrokers and my G4 imac runs awful on IBs Trader Workstation. When the market is closed I can manipulate the stocks and enter bids and offers and such but once the data is streaming in everything lags. Dropdown menus come down blank and take a minute or two to show the words. When I enter a price or delete items they take WAAAAAY to long to react. I'm not exactly a daytrader but occasionally I'm jumping on short term trades where an offer or bid are only there for a few seconds and I can lose a couple hundred bucks or worse in an extreme case. Scottrade functions much better for entering and exiting positions but the whole data feed lags back 2-3 minutes in a heavy market so I'm seeing dead info. Also, the charts are all confounded by errant "ticks", trade data that's out of whack because of the problems streaming the data. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Answer 1

Hi there...
If the lag and performance issues are within the iMacG4 and not the web
or on the sites that may or may not support the Mac OSX and browsers or
other software used to access their trading features, you may be able to
do some routine system maintenance to help. Since you don't say what
you do or how often, or the status of your computer in general outside of
the issues you face in one context of use.
If the performance is due to an over-full hard disk drive, that should be
addressed by freeing-up space for the system and applications to work
better. In these systems, you need to keep a fair amount of drive space
free (empty) and in some cases, disk utilities that offer features not found
in the bootable version of Disk Utility on the OSX installer disc #1 should
be investigated to find out what combination would be best to have on
hand and use a few times a year before a problem takes down a drive.
And if your computer has sufficient hardware RAM resources, it may not
have to rely as much on free hard drive space to use as virtual memory;
even so, it will use a significant amount (and can reach for that instantly)
and using virtual memory from a full hard drive becomes increasingly
impossible. Virtual memory is actually a read/write/read of the hard drive;
so the computer drive works harder and a machine may run warmer, too.
Your machine may not need a full 2GB of RAM but with labor intensive
applications and mult-tasking, more is always better. The machine (if a
USB 2.0 model) can support up to 2GB RAM, aftermarket. RAM has
come along way in three years and these machines can see/use it.
Even booting the machine up in SafeBoot and running the computer's
version of Disk Utility> repair disk permissions; then restarting can
help clear a few cobwebs, so to speak. I do that, usually after what
may be called (by others) a problematic software update; and do a
permissions repair before and after software installs/updates. A few
times a month, I may run the OnyX utility interface and have it do
things as I don't want to learn the unix underpinnings (console, terminal.)
Not to say the application in question above and maybe your internet
access may have their own problems; but system issues can slow all
other things. If you can outline your computer's status, help may be
more directed at specific areas where problems have been known to exist.
Hopefully this helps, and good luck.