I've just installed BOINC 5.2.8 and the Seti@home project (upgraded from Seti@home classic), but I can't get it to do anything unless I set BOINC to Run Always. If I set it to Run based on preferences, BOINC always says it is suspended. I read somewhere that the screensaver sometimes makes the project think the system is not idle, so I've turned off my screensaver. Also, I've got my Seti preferences set to "Do work while computer is in use? no" and "Do work only after computer is idle for 3 minutes"

What else could I be missing?

Thanks,

Andy

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I've got my Seti preferences set to "Do work while computer is in use? no" and "Do work only after computer is idle for 3 minutes"

Hopefully someone with a real answer will post on this, but I've seen some computers that for some unknown reason were just "always in use". I don't know if it's an anti-virus program, or a firewall, or some other program they're running, but they never could get BOINC to do anything until they turned the "do work while in use" to "Yes". However, of those four or five I've seen, only one had any problem with BOINC "interfering" with anything else after making that change, so they left it like that and are happy. BOINC runs at "idle" priority - much lower than even SETI Classic did. It "gets out of the way" exceptionally well.

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I've got my Seti preferences set to "Do work while computer is in use? no" and "Do work only after computer is idle for 3 minutes"

Bill has basically given you the correct answer and also the solution. With the "Do work" preference set to "No", everytime you touch a key or move the mouse, the science app will be suspended and will only restart after 3 minutes of no keyboard/mouse activity - ie just like a screensaver. You could change the default 3 minutes to say 10 seconds so that BOINC could grab a bit more idle time when you stopped using the keyboard.

Ultimately you should try out setting the preference to "Yes" and then see if you really can notice any difference. As Bill said, BOINC gets out of the road very well and you really wont notice any slowdown.

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Cheers,
Gary.

Bill has basically given you the correct answer and also the solution. With the "Do work" preference set to "No", everytime you touch a key or move the mouse, the science app will be suspended and will only restart after 3 minutes of no keyboard/mouse activity - ie just like a screensaver. You could change the default 3 minutes to say 10 seconds so that BOINC could grab a bit more idle time when you stopped using the keyboard.

Ultimately you should try out setting the preference to "Yes" and then see if you really can notice any difference. As Bill said, BOINC gets out of the road very well and you really wont notice any slowdown.

Even when I left the computer overnight with it set to Do work=No, it didn't start doing anything. It seems to only work if I set it to Yes.

If I set it to Yes, does it still stay out of the way if other processes are working hard (such as authoring a DVD), even if I don't move the mouse or hit a key? My system's pretty old, 1GHZ Pentium III running Win98.

Thanks.

Andy

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If I set it to Yes, does it still stay out of the way if other processes are working hard (such as authoring a DVD), even if I don't move the mouse or hit a key? My system's pretty old, 1GHZ Pentium III running Win98.

Ah... the problem is Win98. I can't make any guarantees at all there, because Win98 doesn't fully handle multitasking like WinXP, Linux, OS X, etc. - it SHOULD get out of the way properly, it is running at the lowest available "idle" priority, but the only real answer I can give you is "maybe". If you are doing something lengthy and critical such as burning a DVD, I would exit BOINC first, just to be safe. For normal daily use, web surfing, email, word processing and the like, you should see no problems.

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Thanks for the help. I guess I'll live with the inconvenience for now until I move into this century...

Just for your information, I've been working today with it set to always on and haven't seen any impact from it. I haven't been doing anything extensive, just surfing the web, email, etc.

Thanks again.

Andy

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