MT4 / EA compatibility with 64-bit Vista on an AMD Phenom quad-core desktop

I know someone running about 40 live EAs across 10 instances of MetaTrader, on a single virtual server (effectively a single processor) with 1GB of RAM. One of the major beauties of MetaTrader is the low resource usage, which in turn makes disaster-recovery nice and simple. And until MT5 comes out, chunky hardware isn't going to make much difference to strategy tester performance either.

Vista has led to endless questions on this forum about the location of MetaTrader files. For example: 'where are MY files (EA. templates,..) ??'. Same applies to Windows 7 (or Windows Server 2008).

32-bit vs 64-bit shouldn't make any difference to MetaTrader other than the location of things like Program Files (32-bit version), and the System32 directory (32-bit version) if you're playing with DLL files.

Thanks for the reply jjc. So, if I wanted to spend the extra $170 and get the quad-core PC (to take advantage of once MT5 comes out), do you think I would be "safe" compatibility wise running multiple MT4s within the 64-bit Vista environment?

Thanks again.

I've only personally done the briefest testing of MT4 on 64-bit Vista. You might want to wait for a response from someone who uses this platform all the time. But I can't think why there'd be a problem given that I know personally that MT4 works on Vista, and works on 64-bit systems.

IF you can get Windows XP instead you'll be MUCH happier. Vista will suck the life out of you with its bugs and "features" that are built in to protect you from yourself. Let me say this now - you WILL spend a lot of time trying to get Vista to work properly with MT4. And then you will spend more time trying to keep it working. Once again - its all about the "features" that are there to protect you from yourself. If you are very savvy with Vista then you might be able to figure out how to turn off these features so that you can have control of your computer like you did back in the good old days, but until you figure it out you will suffer. If the hardware is new enough you may not have a choice though, as vendors are starting to drop support for XP - even though the world is united in hatred over Vista. I've been using Vista 64 on a laptop for over a year and there isn't a day that goes by when I don't think about "downgrading" as they call it at Microsoft to XP. I'm just too busy to do it - and not sure that I would be able to find the hardware drivers for my laptop in XP.

That's my two cents...

- Tovan

I run 3 instances of MT4 under a 32bits Vista dual core laptop with a multicurrencies EA: it's ok but I the fan is very active! In a single currency mode the configuration is far enough.

How did you manage this? If I click on the (link-) button for MT4 my Win 7 Beta 64 shows the mouse pointer working and then nothing except that the started MT4 becomes the actual window.

And so far I haven't found anyything to click on that this would program start a second (and 3rd, 4th,..) time?

Beside that a question for 64 users. I have 8GB installed and Win 7 64 running.. It shows that 8GB RAM are available, but absolutely NO program uses this that is 'over' 3GB?

Any idea to convince Win 7 (Vista 64) to make this useable for appl.?

Thanks, carl

Simplifying slightly, 32-bit apps such as MT4 are capped at a 4GB address space (of which 1GB or 2GB gets allocated to the operating system).

ok, but MT4 twice started should use in total 8GB (4GB each) I haven't seen that yet, anybody else does?

but still I don't know how to start and run parralel twi instances of MT4?

Carl

I do this because I work with 3 different brokers. I have installed for each one the platform. 

I read on this forum you can have 3 instances of the same broker if you just duplicate the files of the platform (the files created in your Program Folder when installing the platform).

and what do you mean by platfrom? Do I have to 'double' the MT4 program folder with a second name (e.g. MetaTrader 4.2 ) to start it a second time?