My setup
You may have seen that quad screen image a lot on Bet Angel related material so I thought I would expand the image for you and show you my full set up. Anybody who has visited me will have seen me beavering away at this desk. I’ll give you a brief description of what you see.
(1) Under the desk I have a quad core all singing all dancing PC. You don’t need anything this fancy, as a standard PC will do just fine. I just regress to my techies roots and often get the latest thing. I also use the raw processing power for a lot of analysis and other real workhorse stuff I do outside of my day to day activity.
(2) The four monitors are LG flatron 17″ displays. I bought low profile monitors so the surrounds wouldn’t ruin the quad display. Also the buttons are hidden behind the displays.
(3) I use an Ergotron stand to support the monitors. You see these used quite a lot in these sorts of set ups so I followed suit. I ordered mine from Dell.
(4) I can swap my PC displays from being a quad to a dual display. I have two raw TV feeds coming into the top two monitors if needed. I don’t put these through the PC as I figured out that would increase the delay.
(5) On the left I have a decent laptop. I have chosen one with a long battery life and have spare batteries for it. It is also a touch screen laptop which looks pretty cool if you trade from it!! Overkill again but it does a great job for me.
(6) Attached to the laptop is a Vodafone HSDPA modem. I only chose Vodafone due to the local coverage, yours may vary. If I have a problem with my main PC I can switch immediately to the laptop and work from there. I always have a spare copy of Bet Angel running on this so I can switch instantly.
(7) A plant, it’s always worth adding some greenery into the room. Hey, a bit of carbon offsetting never did any harm did it!
There are a few other things you will be interested in, but those can wait for the moment. If you are looking for an opinion as to the set up, I suggest you can easily trade from just the laptop, preferably with a spare screen on it and a 3G or HSDPA modem as a back up to your broadband. I’ve often traded while off site with just the laptop and chucked in some decent totals. In fact, in the archives there is a post about trading from a car!! So don’t get hung up on having an all singing piece of kit. The person operating it is generally more important!
Category: Technology, Using Bet Angel
