High cpu usage...

[tcosync]

Quote from alanack:

1) Why would this setting change the amount of cpu usage?

2) Might it still not indicate that there might be some sort of hardware problem?

I'm no techie but I'd guess that with the change, you are optimizing your RAM & CPU for your system cache which your charting program uses to store the incoming live data for drawing charts.

I think your hardware is fine. 15% CPU usage is about what I get with the same machine running QuoteTracker, with spikes to 40-50% during high volume periods. It just purrs along beautifully although the 2Gig machine is more than 4 years old.

 

[WD40]

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878-5034438.html

In systems with less RAM, you need to devote as much RAM as possible to just running Windows and your applications.

For a server or a desktop with a lot of RAM, however, choosing the System Cache setting will yield better performance. When set to System Cache, the system will use most of the available RAM as a disk cache, which can result in major performance improvements on systems that depend on disk I/O.