Yeah, Win98's out of support, but hey, if you're begging for unused cycles you'll want the ones on my old machine that's not doing anything important, right? BOINC Manager 5.8.15 still doesn't ever seem to detect user activity except when its own window has focus.

Sure would be nice to have a "run as screensaver only" option.

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Sure would be nice to have a "run as screensaver only" option.

But that's impossible, as not all BOINC projects have graphics/a screen saver. It isn't BOINC that shows you the Seti screen saver (example given). That screen saver is built in in the Seti application.

Given another example, if you run Primegrid, you won't have a Primegrid screen saver. Just because the project doesn't have one (yet). So you'd see the more standard BOINC blue logo bouncing around your screen.

As for Windows 9x user activity, sign up for the BOINC Alpha test and make your complaints about it heard on the Alpha email list.

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Sure would be nice to have a "run as screensaver only" option.

But that's impossible, as not all BOINC projects have graphics/a screen saver. ...
So you'd see the more standard BOINC blue logo bouncing around your screen.

So it is not impossible, it would just mean that on those projects the s/s was rather uninteresting. The point of the suggestion, if I understodd it aright, was not to look at the s/s, but as a workaround to BOINC not noticing user activity to press the win98 code into service to start/stop the s/s at relevant times

Seems a viable workaround to me, if the boinc s/s can be loaded whenever the running project does not have one on offer.

R~~

OK, here's what BOINC can do, that not many people know about.

You don't need to run BOINC all the time, but set the screen saver in Windows to be BOINC. Then as soon as the screen saver will start, BOINC will start up and start crunching whatever it is that it has work for. The thing though is, as soon as you stop the screen saver, BOINC won't stop. It won't unload itself from memory. And that's what people apparently want. "Like Seti did".

So yes, you can set the screen saver to be BOINC.
Yes, it will show either the project screen saver or the BOINC bouncing logo.
No, you can't run BOINC as a screen saver only.
No, BOINC won't unload from memory as soon as you stop the screen saver.

... But you can set BOINC to go to suspend at that time, not using up any more resources than what Boinc.exe and Boinmgr.exe take up in memory (together around 14MB).

And if then for some reason any of that doesn't work on Windows 9x, there is the Alpha test project that these complaints can be written to. Now, if no one does that, then how is it ever going to be fixed?

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You don't need to run BOINC all the time, but set the screen saver in Windows to be BOINC. Then as soon as the screen saver will start, BOINC will start up and start crunching whatever it is that it has work for.

That would suit me fine, but the screen saver just complains:

BOINC is not running.
(Automatic Startup not detected)

We recommend running BOINC at startup;
please reinstall BOINC and select this option.

and never starts up BOINC.

And if then for some reason any of that doesn't work on Windows 9x, there is the Alpha test project that these complaints can be written to. Now, if no one does that, then how is it ever going to be fixed?

I thought this was the vehicle to report problems in the production version. Is there someplace else for that? I'm happy to try out an alpha version if it addresses my problem, but it seems a little silly to start running a test of something I already know doesn't work, just to report a problem against a fix that's not there yet!

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OK, now where do I find the alpha project? I found the download link for the current development version on the "all versions" download page, but I'm not managing to find my way to anyplace other than here for discussion of it.

In any case, I see that the version notes say it has a new scheduler, so I'll give it a try now.

Thanks!

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All the email lists are here.

Alpha project is here. But you need to send a request to the developers for an account.

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Kathryn :o)

Apparently, back when I reported this problem in version 5.4.9, I also managed to find BoincZilla and report it there, where it never got any action. I just got a notice that my problem was closed, with the explanation:

Migrating BOINC Bug System to http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac.

It's not clear whether my problem will be copied there or I should open a new one.

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Migrating BOINC Bug System to http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac.

It's not clear whether my problem will be copied there or I should open a new one.

Looks like you should do it yourself.

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"Important" unfixed bugs from BoincZilla are being copied to Trac.