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I've had my wife's computer running BOINC for awhile now (50 % Seti, 25% climate prediction, 25 % einstein).

Lately (since I installed an "aquarium" screen saver that she got for her birthday), it's been taking *FOREVER* to crunch Seti WUs.

Case in point: I just had to abort/dump 4 WUs that had expired (and never processed). The BOINC client (the latest version) was reporting that it would take between 40 and 60 hours to process EACH WU.

So I figured the problem was the new screen saver. Since it's the wife's computer and she wants it on there, I cannot uninstall nor disable it. So I figured I'd just go into the "power saving" settings and set it to disable the monitor (and I would think turn off the screen saver) after an hour.

But the WUs are still taking forever (to the point that they often expire before crunching is even close to complete).

Any suggestions on what I can do to get this box reasonably crunching again (without going the route of uninstalling/disabling the aquarium screen saver)?

For the record, the machine in question is a home-built AMD Athlon XP 1.4 GHz, running Windows 98 SE.

5 times · Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 1:58 pm Post subject:

a screensaver like aquarium will take close to 100% of your cpu power to generate the images.

if you want to boinc anything, never run a screensaver.
you want to maximise the wu production.

get TaskInfo and watch what is happening when the screen saver kicks in.

Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:46 pm Post subject:

BTW and FYI you are better off turning the monitor off. Its a major electricity waster and its pointless having the thing on unless you are there with it

5 times · Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 3:24 am Post subject:

but if he was worried about that, he'd turn off the computer too
and what would be the point of Boinc then ?

screen blanking after screensaver mode is pretty much enough for saving electricity.