Natalie,
I've been using Tradestaton 4 for years and for ease of use, joy of charting, graphic aesthetics, I think it's the best. Tradestation 2000i probably shares all of these qualities as long as you get the latest version, I'm told it's much more bug free than the earlier versions. The earlier versions of TS 2000i caused a lot of grief to a lot of people but I think most have gotten past that with the SP5 version. You need a lot of Ram and the build 822(I think) SP5 version. You can find all the information, opinions, and help(especially with Easy Language and formulas) on the Omega mailing list. I'll paste in the subscription email I received from the list almost 2 years ago:
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jimo@eskimo.com
maintainer of
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If you have Tradestation this list is the best source of information that I know of. It's an old list and has many long time Tradestation users as members, including some well known persons from the trading world.
Tradestation 4 is available via the Russians for either $100 or $150. The latest version is v.27 and I can't think of any real problems it has accept that it isn't set up for internet data but you can use Dynastore Lite for TS4 to solve that problem.
Easy Language is not that hard to learn, and there are many people very adept with it on the Omega mailing list who will help you with just about any problem...and there is also an archive web site run by one of the members called
www.traders2traders.com with formulas, some refresh data, and archives of messages.
Good luck,
John