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Problem with charts not updating fixed


mmoy

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  • 1 month later...

I'm seeing a current problem with TQQQ not updaing the chart but there's a bigger performance problem which I believe is due to VirtualBox - I upgraded last week and saw some severe performance issues afterwards. I ran it on an old i7 system without the VM and it ran fine. So I may need to find another hardware solution for Medved Trader in the office. In the meantime, I will just keep running it in Virtual Box but it doesn't look like I will be able to change anything.

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I have not tried VMWare but I've been using VirtualBox for over a decade and am used to that and it can be tricky moving Windows licenses over from one VM to another. With VirtualBox, I could just grab a VM from backup and try it on an older version. This morning I just grabbed a spare laptop and hooked it up to a KVM and updated Medved Trader. I just have to get my portfolio information into it and I should be good to go. I suspect that even a 10-year-old W10 laptop will run better than the VM setup. I have a lot of old hardware in the basement and sometimes grabbing old hardware to do something is easier than fiddling with VMs. I will get around to it eventually but this is a quick and dirty fix that I know will work.

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I am nominally back up and running but only with charts of my current holdings. The W10 problem of large title bars remains and I may have to get a high-resolution monitor to fix that problem. As expected, though, the performance of a 2008 laptop with 4 GB of RAM and a Dual-Core Intel Processor is quite good. MT is using up 142 MB of RAM which is excellent as well. Microsoft may have fixed that VM issue that I had last year where MT would use up to 12 GB of RAM. So far, so good. I'll need to add several things to make trading like it was before but I'll get around to that over time.

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Everything is running fine now. There is one chart that's a little wonky (displaying whole day instead of just up to the current time but I figure that I hit a key or a menu item and screwed it up. I'lll fix it eventually. So I didn't change VirtualBox - I just deleted everything, reinistalled and rebuilt my portfolios and charts and slowed down the performance settings.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just a note on the performance issues that I had a while ago trying to diagnose this problem. It appears that there's a process called SearchProtocolHost.exe that's trying to index the disk (it's a small disk - mainly just QuoteTracker on this Virtual Machine, and it's consuming a ton of resources. I found that this is a common problem on Windows. Microsoft has been trying to fix it for years. So now I have to debug this problem on my system.

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I turned it off and there are still performance problems so more debugging to go. I have Medved Trader up and running but can't update my portfolio. I can't even get rid of the Update reminder.  I'm going to take a look at the video settings next. I'm tempted to just go to Costco and buy a W10 system for running MT.

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I'm going to try a free trial of Parallels. Parallels has a nice porting tool from my VirtualBox VM. They have some other nice tools so that I can port other Windows 7 installations as well. I think that I have a couple of machines with licenses on them that I can grab if I need more than one.

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I came into the office, fired up the W7 VM on Parallels and then MT and the windows were all scrunched up on the screen. So I tried to figure out what happened and it looks like Parallels uses the resolution of the native Retina display. I tested it last night at home where I run on external displays. At the office, I use the Mac screen for MT and an external display for other stuff. I tried getting it back to 1920x1200 but that didn't work so well so I decided to resize the chart windows and just live with native resolution. It actually works quite nicely as there's a lot more detail available despite the charts being the same size. The title bar letters look better too. So I have everything running and performance seems to be okay though I'll really know once the trading day starts. Only other thing I had to do was to reactivate Windows.

So I'm hoping that everything is good with this setup. Just a note that the vast majority of my problems are related to VirtualBox and Windows but hopefully I have a combination that I won't have to worry about for a long time. This might be a solution for Windows 10 too as the higher resolution might fix the issue with the bigger spacing of the title bar buttons.

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43 minutes ago, Jerry Medved said:

If you are running VM anyway, why don't you update it to Windows 10?  Its free.

the picture you sent - that would not be an issue on Windows 10 because of the much better handling of Windows font sizing. 

I will reply to you via email

The original problems that I had with Windows 10 were the Virtual Memory problem and the problem with the large buttons on the Title Bars. The Virtual Memory problem seems to have been fixed as I can run it on my home desktop with no problems (that machine is identical to my former office Windows desktop. The second problem is still there and the limiting factor is the number of realtime charts that I can display on a monitor at a time. It is possible that this is fixed with using the native resolution on the Retina MacBook Pro screen as there are more pixels to work with but I haven't tested this out. It takes me about an hour to setup my environment and I was already pretty busy trying to get Parallels to work.

I'm not clear on the cost of Windows 10. Microsoft had a free upgrade program from Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 but it only lasted a year so that's not an option for me. Parallels will install a free Windows 10 Developers edition for you to use but I don't know whether or not you have to buy it at some point or prove that you're a developer by joining a program. It's pretty clear that I'm going to buy a Parallels license today as everything is working well (the edit portfolios thing is a minor annoyance). Using Parallels fixes a few other issues with using the Windows 7 Virtual Machine (I have another program that used to only run on Windows but it's been ported to macOS after requests for ten years).

So I will get around to playing with Windows 10 as Windows 7 expires in about two years and I'll need a new solution anyways. Other stuff that I don't like about Windows 10 are forced updates, where the forced updates add functionality that I don't want, where updates reset your defaults, etc. I just want an OS that works and that is stable - kind of like an appliance. I don't need new and improved for trading; just stability and bugfixes.

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Jerry Medved said:

You can still get it free if you have a valid license for the Windows 7, 8, etc. You can get the download here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows

NOTE: it is the same Windows 10 even though downloaded from that page. 

I had a look at the developers license and it's good until 12/1/2017. So I think that I'll do some testing using the free developers license. I really don't want to upgrade my W7 license as I'm worried about not being able to go back. I do have at least one more W7 license on an old iMac that's been retired and I will try to pull that license and set it up with Parallels and that has the potential for an upgrade to W10 on a permanent basis.

 

 

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