Well, it had to happen. I was trying to install some new formulas and got the message that my formula file is full. Many of you must have hit the limit. Any suggestions on how to get around this without having to weed out formulas every time that I want to enter a new one?

I have installed MS on a second computer so that I have a place to add new formulas. My primary computer, with its full formula file, reacts very slowly when I try to save a change to any of my custom formulas. Even simple formulas require about 4 minutes to save a minor change. My expert advisor button is also slow to open the first time I open that file after restarting MS.

Weeding out custom formulas is going to be a huge undertaking at this point because of the caution needed to avoid deleting a formula required by a an expert, an explorer or system tester. Also, I have many old formulas, some going back to the days when formulas were assigned by number and not by name. Also have a lot of older formulas left over from the days when variables were not allowed, nor multiple plots in one formula, which means that I have multiple MACD formulas with different periods, etc. Obviously these can be consolidated into one formula with variables included. All of this involves a lot of work.

At least in the old days, you could have multiple formula files located in different folders and you could change between these files by changing the referenced location. Point is that I hate to spend a lot of time with maintenance activities, same applies to the downloader data, when I should be focusing on market analysis and testing new formulas.

Given the power of today's computers, how much effort is involved in changing the program to allow larger formula files and/or going back to the condition where multiple file locations are allowed? Is the fact that my formula file is maxed out likely what is causing the slow performance of the program?

Improvements like these, that make the software more easily used, is what interests me more than some of the bells and whistles added of late.

Thanks hayseed.

I still use my 4 year old laptop as my primary computer. I started with an IBM, 20 years ago, moved to a couple of Gateways, and 4 years ago moved to Compaqs, laptop and two desktops. They are not souped up systems, but very happy with them for the money. Most souped up systems seem to be geared towards gamers and multimedia. I primarily have a need for business applications and except for the realtime version of MS would think that MS does not require the best system to be more than adequate. I have a new hard drive on my laptop with plenty of room and 1 Gig of physical memory and what appears to be 2 Gigs of virtual memory. Seems like that should be enough. The most demanding aspect of MS seems to be when I shut down the real time version. If I exit the program, the data feed continues to run for some time and uses up a lot of the computer resources. I was not aware that this was happening until Equis contacted me and accused me of running MS on multiple machines at the same time. Seems that I would exist MS at work, but the data feed did not shut down, and then would fire it up when I got home. The funny thing is that even after MS closes, and the data feed is still running, my task manager says that MS is still running and is using up most of my computer resources.

Cant't remember how much memory I had on my IBM twenty years ago (Remember expanded and extended memory?) but had a 40 MB hard drive and all my friends told me that I would never be able to fill it up if I lived to be 100. That was a PS2 Model 80 and expandable to 80 MB. It was supposed to be able to function as a server for a small office, which is why I bought it. Remember the MASH cast pushing IBMs in the late 80s.

At any rate, hope MS comes up with one of my suggested solutions, maybe with a folder system that will help to organize formulas, maybe keeping formulas for different plug-ins in different folders. I would like a henry folder, and a Jose folder, and a Roy folder, etc.

Thanks johnl.

I did as you suggested and it seems to have helped. Of interest is the fact that many of the explorer reports on my system could not be opened because a pop up message said that they were incompatible with the version of MS on my machine. Some reports were years old, so perhaps that was part of the problem.

IMHO, the answer is to be able to arrange your formulas into seperate files and then edit the registry to point MS at the right indicator file. In the old days, this used to be able to be done on the fly from within MS, but now it must be done before MS starts. One solution therefore is to write a Windows script which asks the user which formula file to use, then writes this value to the registry, then starts MS; if you need to change formula files, then you will need to shutdown and restart MS after editing the registry.

wabbit [:D]