Each month in this Journal, our technical support staff addresses issues of interest to many CSI subscribers in a question-and-answer format. 

Notice:
  The views and information expressed in this document reflect the opinions and experience of the author Robert C. Pelletier.  Neither CSI nor the author undertake or intend to provide tax advice or trading advice in any market or endorse any outside individual or firm.  All recommendations are provided for their informational value only.  Readers should consult competent financial advisors or outside counsel before making any software purchase or investment decision.  CSI does not stand behind or endorse the products of any outside firms.

Copyright (c) 2001 Commodity Systems Inc. (CSI).  All rights are reserved.

A.
    We have tested it here at our office and have had no problems. It looks like they are fully compatible. The startup routine is a little different for the XP version as described here:

    To launch UA with Windows XP, click the "Start" button, and then click "All Programs." Scroll through the list to "CSI Unfair Advantage." Move to the "Launch UA" entry and click. The program will start normally. After several UA uses, "CSI Unfair Advantage" will be added to the list of favorite programs that displays immediately when you click the "Start" button.

Q.
    My hard drive ran out of space. Did UA cause this?

A.
    UA was, no doubt, a contributing factor, but could not have been the sole cause. The massive UA database takes a fair amount of room, but not enough to fill a hard drive. The full stock database consumes 300MB, the commodity database consumes 80MB and the software itself takes up about 50MB. This degree of hard drive consumption is not normally a problem on well equipped computer systems, with storage space typically measured in multiple gigabytes.

    It is possible that redundant copies of UA could be taking up unnecessary space on your drive. If you make a backup copy of UA before upgrading (as recommended), you might want to delete the backup once you know the upgrade is functional. There is no benefit in keeping older generations of the software or in keeping outdated copies of the database, so they should also be deleted.

    Storing old copies of UA (and other programs) in your "Recycle Bin" can also waste disk space. To find out what's in your Recycle Bin, right-click the "Start" button and then click "Explore." Scroll down to "Recycle Bin" (usually near the bottom of the list) and double-click it. Navigate through the entries in search of "UA" folders. If you find any, you can either delete them individually or click "Empty Recycle Bin" on the File menu to remove everything in the directory.

    One customer suggested that UA was the cause of his computer's lack of operational response, forcing him to take his computer to a repair shop. The technician determined that the hard drive was nearly full, so he deleted the "restore" directory, including the backup copy of the operating system held there. Doing so freed up several gigabytes of disk space, a quantity that dwarfed the space used by UA (far less than one gigabyte). Several manufacturers include the "System Restore" option in their computers and in all cases, the resulting "restore" (or equivalent) directory can consume a very significant portion of the hard drive. Deleting the "restore" directory has the drawback of disabling the recovery feature.

Q.
    UA ordinarily updates my data in a few minutes each day, but there were a couple of days last month when the download was really slow. Why is that?

A.
    On two consecutive days in October, CSI launched a new capability for stock traders that enabled traders to focus upon the price/earnings ratio for about 9,000 stocks.  On those two days, company earnings were transmitted to the database held on each customer's computer. This, regrettably, was a lengthy process that significantly slowed the overall daily distribution time for most customers. We regret this one-time inconvenience, but it was necessary to provide our customers with price/earnings ratios for selected stocks on a daily basis.  Daily updates to these data files will be handled more quickly as reported earnings fluctuate for various financial entities.

    Find the new Price/Earnings information on UA's "Factsheet about Markets" screen (formerly called the "Factsheets"). This feature is part of versions 2.4.3 and higher. If you don't already have version 2.4.3, you can order it by e-mail or by calling customer support. See page 10 for pricing information on this CD-only upgrade.