cpu maxing

[winsten]

I have a problem with my cpu maxing out(according to the task manager) and causing significant slowdowns. I run Win 2k on an amd 1.0 ghz athlon with 512 megs pc133 sdram on an Abit kt-7 Raid motherboard. My video card is a Matrox g200 quad card. I run 4 sony 21" 500 ps monitors. My internet connection is a 512/256 cable modem. I run a realtime stock quote and chart program called e-signal on all 4 monitors (16 bit color at 85hz) plus internet browsers and a charting database software program. Most of the time this all runs fine. But when market activity is really heavy- Usually at the open my cpu gets maxed out to 100% and I can't hardly do anything. When I look at the processes tab in my task manager the culprit is always winsig.exe (my real-time quote software using 90+ of cpu). If I change my layout to only cover 2 monitors then I am fine. But I have 4 other monitors that I want to run also for a total of 8 by adding another 4 port card. So finally we get to my question. What is the bottleneck and how do I fix it? Should I build a dual mp system or is the pci bus causing me these problems? I make my living trading so I don't have a problem investing in new equipment but don't want to waste money on a solution that doesn't help.

 

[pm]

Hmmm. Well so much for my suggestion of moving the question to this forum... Not a lot of answers here either.

I'm having a hard time trying to figure out possible fixes. If it's that the CPU that simply can't handle the computational level of this one program, I don't think that adding a second CPU will help. If the winsig.exe program is written to be multithreaded or SMP-capable, then there is a good chance that this will help, but my guess is that this is probably not the case. My advice is a CPU upgrade to something like an Intel Pentium 4 2GHz, or the AMD equivalent. This appears to be a CPU-limited problem, so I would recommend upgrading to the fastest CPU that your budget can allow.