Your Trading Office

How to Maintain Your Trading Computer to Keep It Lean and Mean

By Larry Jacobs -- Editor of Traders World magazine

If you are a trading professional and rely on your trading computer for quotes, charts, news and executions, you need to maintain the computer to keep it lean and mean. What are the steps to maintaining your computer? Here is the list:

1. At least every 3 months, open the side of the computer. Get an air can. You can buy one at Walmart, Kmart, Best Buy or any computer store. Blow out the dust around the CPU cooler, case fans and any filters in the computer.

Heat is the biggest enemy of your computer. It causes computer shut-downs and can ruin your motherboard, memory, CPU and drive. Don't use a vacuum. The magnetic field around the vacuum will ruin your computer.

2. Make sure the computer has enough air around it, so it stays cool. If it is against the wall, move it away. No side of the computer should be against anything, so the case can dissipate the built-up heat inside the computer.

3. To help the computer run faster, use a registry cleaner, such as CCleaner. This straightens out the registry and gets rid of the garbage in it.

4. Defrag your computer at least once a week. Use REG Defragmenter, a free registry defragmenter. This rearranges the data on your drive so that your computer can easily access it.

5. Use Tune XP to optimize your computer. The manual in the Help section of your computer explains how to use it.

6. Use the disc clean-up program of your computer in the system tools to remove all of the unneeded old files in the computer. Old files will slow down the computer.

7. You should always back up the computer, using an external drive, if possible. Acronis is an excellent software utility for doing this. Use Acronis to make a clone of your drive in case it should crash or get a serious virus infection that you can't get out.

The Sonata Trading Computers have two removable, easily accessible front drives. The first drive is the main operating drive, and the second is the clone drive. When the clone is made, it can be easily removed and kept in a safe place. If anything happens to the first drive, it can be removed and replaced with the clone within a couple minutes.

8. A trading computer should be replaced or upgraded every 3 years. There is no reason to use an outdated computer for the serious task of trading. The Sonata Trading Computer has an upgrade program that allows a trader to upgrade his or her computer to the latest technology, usually for 50 percent less than the purchase price of a new one.

For more information about getting the right trading computer and maintaining it, you can go to www.tradersworld.com.