Reliable FX Trading

This is typically reflected by badly optimized trading platform (and there are a lot of them) where a long freeze is experienced during high volatile markets. For example during an important market news your platform will receive so much price ticks that it will either overload your CPU processing capacity or your internet connection, hence induce heavy lag. This will result either in requotes when submitting your trades, or simply platform freezes rendering trading virtually impossible during news.

Most of low end computer have a severe lack of RAM. RAM is like harddisk space where fast accessible temporary data is stock to run any software on the spot (such as a trading platform). If you do not have enough RAM your platform may freeze during market peak time. Your platform may in fact freeze as well even during normal market time if another softwares launches at the same time (ex: while your are submitting an order your antivirus launches for the daily scheduled virus scan).

The prevent this you must increase your RAM whether by investing in new RAM sticks and installing them directly in your computer laptop / desktop or by using a RAM enhancer software. Now there are only two software that I would recommend for that end:

eboostr for Windows XP based systems: http://www.eboostr.com/
Readyboost for Vista based systems: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/readyboost.aspx

Those softwares will enable your computer to use USB sticks the same way it uses RAM sticks. Of course USB sticks storage space is accessed much slower than your RAM sticks, but for low end computers the USB stick access rate will be much higher than the harddrive. Low end computers can experience a very significant speed boost and might help your system avoid long freezes since your softwares data will be stored to be accessed quickly on your USB stick instead on your harddrive.

This can be a serious threat for users who are looking for a reliable system since can hinder or even totally stop your system during critial trading time. VSM can either induce conflicts between installed softwares (i.e. crash your platform in a random pattern), considerably reduce your computer memory (RAM), or simply lock your computer up.

The Antivirus I am currently using at home is Antivir. This is by far the most efficient antivirus software I have used so far. Not too heavy, to too exacting, and still catches 95% of the threats I have encountered. 95% may sound not too much, but don't think other software such as the very power hungry norton anitivirus, or the very excellent Kaspersky can do better.
Go grab now a free Antivir copy from http://www.avira.com//

The for the 5% not catched by Antivir (which are most of the time spywares) I recommend malwarebytes. This is by very very far the best antispyare/antimalware software I have. You can download a free copy from http://www.malwarebytes.org/

Although this would not directly lead to an enhancement of your system performance, monitoring your CPU, harddisk, motherboards and memory sticks heating is recommanded only if you experience system unstability. This would help you discover which component may have overheating problems.

CPUID (http://www.cpuid.com/)have developped a free software enabling computer users to monitor live all above listed components heating. There are acceptable temperature ranges for each component, depending on every system. After installing this dashboard you may check on the web if your system is reaching acceptable levels or not. Don't forget that dusty computers may overheat much faster than clean ones.

If you think your system is overheating and you do not want to purchase and install a new/additional fan on your computer, there a very nice free software that allows you to directly control existing fans speed :
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php