I have a 40 mhz 386 PC compatible computer running MS-DOS 5, with
co-processor, no Windows and no mouse. I subscribe to the Xpress
Executive service.
The new software requires a 286 type computer with 2-3 megabytes of
hard disk.
You run a TSR in the background to do the quote and news
collection. When you want to look at the collected stuff, you
run a Windows-like program called XVIEW. It is incredibly slow.
All commands seem to invoke some kind of disk activity, which may
explain some of the slowness.
The quote screen is really diffcult to update. On the old
software, you essentially just typed in symbols and that was it.
This one has "portfolios", which you need to go into various
screens to put symbols in one at a time. The screens tend to go
back to the main screen a lot requiring you go negotiate your way
back to where you were typing the detail stuff in.
Its hard to see what is happening on the quote screen because you
can only see 8 quotes at a time and need to use the arrow
keys to see anything else. Doesn't seem to have any paging
features. They added the tick feature back in but it is way over
on the right side, which requires a lot of arrow keystrokes to go look
at it and the symbol is not visible when the tick is. The order
of the data is different too. It is last (price), (price) change,
volume, high, low, bid, asked, open and tick.
Under the old software, the end of day quotes would have the high
and low prices but this software only seems show the closing
price and change. The high, low and volume are there during the market
hours.
There is a charting feature to graph your stock or indexes every
hour. Options are hourly, daily or weekly. The problem I have
is that when I go to another screen and come back, it forgot all
about the chart I just spent about a minute defining.
A mouse would help considerably as you need to do a bunch of
keystrokes to move around without one.
There is a feature that tells you how good your data feed is. It
gives a rating on a 100 scale. Another statistic shows the
errors.
I also have problems in which the software doesn't behave
consistently. If I exit and return, some functions that went
dead during the session would start to work again.
I was thinking that, if I put the program in a ram disk, it
would speed things up considerably. However, as it is now, it
crashes while you are trying to cruise (battle?) through the
options or sometimes when it is just sitting there. If you
reboot the computer, sometimes requiring the reset button, the
information is not lost as it has been saved on the disk except
during the reboot phase. I don't know what it is doing when it
gets stuck. Maybe it is still collecting information or maybe it
is just dead. If I put the software on a ram disk to speed things up,
then it will lose the collected information on a reboot.
Some of the problems I am encountering may be my unfamiliarity
with the software but it's not very intuitive either. You cannot
read the manual and make the software work. You need to read the
errata manual, which has a lot of stuff in it, and it still works
wierd.
If this is the software they are shipping for all new
subscribers, I don't think they are going to retain very many new
subscribers.
I am using my old 8 mhz PC/XT with the old software for now. I
use the PC Magazine KEY-FAKE program to feed the carriage returns
to the program on startup so the program is ready to use
immediately (I still need to give it one more carriage return to
go to the quote screen and haven't figured out why it doesn't go
all the way). I also use the PC Magazine ONE-KEY program to
define a couple of the function keys to contain a string of
keystrokes to allow me to do screen prints, article prints, go to
the Market Movers screen and print all the quote screens with one
key stroke. I have a timer which turns on the computer in the
afternoon so the information is ready when I get home. The old
software is reasonably peppy, not fancy but functional and
robust.
I hope they are not going to start formatting the data for the
new software and rendering the old software obsolete.
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