mmoy

Sometimes QT windows would wind up in the wrong Virtual Desktop. My main problem with Windows 10 was that Medved Trader would eat up all of the Virtual Memory on my system and it would eventually become non-responsive. This on a machine with 12 GB of RAM. It uses about 400 MB on Windows 7. Other people don't have this problem so it might be an issue with my hardware or environment. But I didn't feel like trying to spend any additional time debugging it. I do hate Windows 10 for other reasons as well.

I had some issues with virtual desktops and Medved Trader when I played around with it a year ago. This was with Medved Trader in one Microsft VD with other programs in other VDs. I didn't try putting different MT windows in different VDs. This was on Windows 10 using Microsofts VD feature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I sent you a picture. The scoll bar is almost 100% filled and the timing is 7AM to 6 PM. It also shows the "Show Entire Current Day" as unchecked.

I tried that but it shows the whole day whether or not it's checked. I suppose that it could be a bug.

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.

I did a rebuild of MT on VirtualBox and it runs fine afterhours but we'll see how it performs in the morning. I dialed down the responsiveness on quotes and hopefully that helps.

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.

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.

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.

When I went to try to choose the date column, it wouldn't add it. It appears that I can't use the Column Chooser at all - well, I can use it but it doesn't work.

Problem came back this morning. Several charts not updating.

Everything is looking good this morning after the update including CTRL. This fix is a big help as I would generally turn things on and I wouldn't be aware of what was going on with a few stocks until I looked closer. I think that I've always had this problem to some degree,

Interesting: AAPL changed date to 05/11/18 after the clear all data and the chart isn't updating now.

BRK/A. But there were others as well. I just fixed them all with clear data. Where do I get the log and setup?

The problem is back this morning. One ticker on my screen has 03/20/18 while the rest have 08/28/17. I imagine that there are more in portfolios that aren't displayed.

Everything seems to be fine this morning. I will play with adding symbols next week.

I'll check it tomorrow morning to see whether the problem comes back. If it doesn't come back, then I guess I could add a bunch of symbols and then check the date column to see whether or not they are correct.

Yup, that fixed the problem. thanks. Is this cruft from older versions or will I have to do this regularly?

In looking around, it appears that I have a number of symbols with the problem. Some are 11/01/17 and some are 11/03/17. It would take a while to clear all of them and then add them and the charts back in. Probably 90 minutes or so. Can't do that during the trading day. Unless clearing the data on all symbols is an operation that can be done in one go without wiping the charts and portfolio data out.