A few days ago I start to notice that "Time to Completion" is way off on one of my systems running Seti@Home
CPU:
Intel(R) Core(tm)2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz Microsoft Windows XP SP3

It says it will take 20 days but it only really takes about 3 hours at most.

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Please go to the Seti website, your account, computers on this account, computer ID number, scroll all the way down and post what the number is for the task duration correction factor.

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Task duration correction factor 57.762506

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That's your problem.

OK, to fix this, first exit BOINC.
If you're running it as single/shared install, just go BOINC Manager->File->Exit.
If you're running it as a service, go through Start->Run, type net stop boinc and click OK.

Next navigate to your BOINC directory, by default in C:\Program Files\BOINC
Edit client_state.xml with Notepad or another text editor.

In it find the entry for setiathome.berkeley.edu
now in this part find the entry between <duration_correction_factor></duration_correction_factor> and edit it so the number shows 1.000000 (including the 6 zeros).

Save client_state.xml through File->Save. Do not use Save As... as that adds a .txt or other extension that we don't need.

Restart BOINC.
If single/shared install, Start->Programs->BOINC->BOINC Manager.
If service install, Start->Run, type net start boinc and click OK.

Open BOINC Manager, Advanced view, Projects tab, select Seti@Home and click Update. This makes sure that the website also knows this new number.

And that should do it.
How it got to this big a number? One possible cause is a system-clock that was way off (couple of months into the future or past) while BOINC was running.

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Ok all done, Thanks for your help.

My system clock does go out to the web every night to update the time.

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How it got to this big a number? One possible cause is a system-clock that was way off (couple of months into the future or past) while BOINC was running.

Another possible cause is if a WU takes much longer than it should, for whatever reason (I once had a hung application that made one of my hosts crawl and badly upset my DCF for a project). The DCF then gets adjusted upwards as if all estimated completion times for that project are that far out. It will adjust downwards again as more WUs are crunched (in their normal amount of time), but this downward adjustment is much slower - I believe it is 10% of the adjustment that should be made to fully correct the factor.

Rod

...find the entry between <duration_correction_factor></duration_correction_factor> and edit it so the number shows 1.000000 (including the 6 zeros).

Why to specify the zero that precisely? Client will understand 1.0 too...

Peter

Not all BOINC versions did, Peter. So it's best to add the six zeroes, as then it'll always works.

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