The times of needing to have a giant megalith of a Computer simply to run notepad are long over. Even so that the regularly quoted suggestions for running the Metatader four platform software is a two GHz CPU minimum. I am sure those suggestions are left over from the times of the supper hot Pentium 4, where speed was measured in clock cycles and not computational performance. A Forex Expert Advisor like Gomega Xray should be on twenty-four hours a day and practically seven days each week. You shut it down on Sundays for maintainence or need to reboot it for security updates but it must be back on before the markets open again for your EA to manage your open positions. So a quiet and energy efficient Computer would be the most suitable presuming it can handle the work load of running the Metatrader four platform and any EAs you have running.

Just lately a number of low power computers became available based on the new Intel Atom CPU. Whilst PC hardware fans may tell you that these little PCs aren’t sufficient to do any heavy work, I am certain that anything that offers better performance than the 1st generation Centrino platform, merits another look.

The Asus EeeBox appeared a sensible choice to try out this concept and I decided to purchase the EeeBox B202 which consumes less than thirty watts at maximum power. Under the hood is the Intel Atom N270, 1GB of DDR2 RAM and a 160GB drive. My system came with Windows XP and was just about ready to run Metatrader right from the box.

The other nice feature of this tiny Computer is that it can be attached to the back of an LCD screen using the VESA mounting ( ever marvelled what those screw holes in the back of your LCD screen were for? ). You can drive up to two screens, with a maximum resolution of 2048 by 1536 each. That should be adequate for most of us. I am using it with a single screen at 1680 by 1050. It may be used with the new HD screens which have a resolution of 1920 by 1080.

Up and Running with Gomega Xray

So would the Metatrader four platform and Gomega Xray be too much for this little energy efficient Computer? I installed Gomega Xray and setup the 6 currency pairs as explained in the Quantum manual. Then checked the CPU load whilst the system was actively trading on a demo account. The maximum load as according to the windows task manager  was 5% and the average around 2%. So this is unquestionably a practicable system to trade twenty-four hours a day with, on autopilot.

Simply to try and stress the system a little, I attempted burning a DVD whilst watching a video file, all with Gomega trading in the background. The system was running nicely at 25% CPU use. Whilst I don’t suggest using your system to do anything other than running your EA, it is good to know there’s processing power to spare with this system. As a side note, quickly moving the mouse around causes CPU use to spike up to 38%. Obviously Microsoft have done litle to optimize their code for such a basic and fundamental task.

The installation instructions for Gomega Xray are exhaustive and simple to follow, prepared in a step by step format. There are also setup videos that walk you thru the original setup and configuration of Gomega, including the recommended settings. This must be one of the simplest install and setup. Whilst there’s a some new language to cope with like Market Pulse, X Spread and Randomness indicators, these too are entirely explained in the Under the Hood video, which is a component of the setup guide.

Even though it is common to get stuck in and start back testing Expert Advisors first and then forward test. I have opted to let it run on a new demo account and observe it in action. I downloaded Metatrader direct from Metaquotes.net and setup a $5000 demo account with Alpari. I then setup Gomega Xray according to the installation instructions. This was about twelve hours ago and Xray has so far opened four trades on different currency pairs and is currently showing an unrealized $148 profit. These trades are all still open so a lot could occur before Gomega closes the trades at the either the profit target or the stop loss setting. However it is really a great start and I am looking forward to checking the situation in the morning.

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