Acording to:“General Preferences These apply to all BOINC projects in which you participate” “Do work only after computer is idle for 3 minutes.” That’s not what is happening. My CPU usage show projects are running all the time and pegging my system at 100%.

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Need to know BOINC version and Operating System at least... but I'll throw out a couple of possibilities.

Changing prefs on the website take effect on the local host when it next connects, so you may need to hit "Update" for the project you set the prefs on.

If you have multiple venues (home, school, office) set in preferences, make sure this computer is assigned to the correct venue where you set the preference.

Reboot or completely exit BOINC including any background processes, then restart and look in the "Messages" tab. There will be a couple of lines regarding preferences, telling you which project the preferences were loaded from, and which venue. If the project or venue reported is not what you expect, check preferences on that project.

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Version is 5.2.13. The latest I believe. I will execute the UPDATE and see. However, this is what they were originally set to.

I have in the last few days spent more time on BOINC that I did with years running the old SETI. I am not a happy camper.

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The BOINC boards don't give us the option of seeing your computers, OS, etc., like the projects boards do, and we definitely can't read minds, so you have to bear with us if we have to ask more questions to collect all the information we need. You still didn't answer the question of what OS you're running, and that is the _main_ key to being able to address your problem.

If you are running Win95 or Win98, the "computer is idle" detection is pretty worthless. Generally people see the opposite problem, where everything - including running a screensaver - makes the computer "busy", so BOINC doesn't run. The reverse _has_ been seen however. This is an OS issue and there's nothing BOINC can do to fix it.

Likewise if WinXP-class OS, if a "shared" install, _sometimes_ only the 'main' user's activity will be detected, other users will not, so it continues to run when the other users are active. In which case installing as a service may accomplish your goals.

On any Windows OS, I think, there is a product called "Threadmaster" that can throttle down BOINC's CPU usage if we can't otherwise solve the "in use" issue. However, other than possibly increased fan noise, on faster computers, this type of thing is rarely needed, as BOINC runs at "idle" priority. It is MUCH better at "getting out of the way" even when running 100% than Classic was. Only on the very slowest computers or the very oldest OSes is it likely that you can even tell if the "run only when idle" is even SET.

If a Linux OS, there are all kinds of Linux experts here that can be brought in.

If Mac, then I'm the one who will try to duplicate your problem, and I'll need to know type of Mac install and a lot of other info.

But again, without knowing what OS you are on, we don't even know WHO to have look at it, much less what to look at. The more information you can give us, the better we can help.

Also possibly helps to know: What projects are you attached to? Does the screensaver for that project work or do you even use the screensaver? Do you have a dual-core CPU or a CPU with HyperThreading? If you are on Windows, we definitely need to know CPU type. And anything else you can think of that might be relevant...

As for how much time you've spent on BOINC, I don't know what other issues you've had, possibly on the SETI site; but on _these_ boards, this was your first question. BOINC is more complex than SETI Classic, there is no doubt. It is poorly documented by UCB (although the Wiki does an incredible job of picking up the slack for that). But if you think of Classic as being Notepad or TextEdit, then BOINC is Word; yes, it takes a bit more to get it up and going, but it _does_ an enormous amount more than Classic ever did.

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