When I first installed BOINC I put it onto a partition with 2GB total space, and about 100mb free space (winxp sp2 pro).
I signed up to Einstein@Home but recieved no work. Message being. "Not enough space (64Mb free & alloted). Free some space, and set my preferences to allow more disk usage, it goes on to say 94Mb isn't enough space.
Now my problem is that (having re-installed onto another partition) I'm running E@Home (for about a week now) and it's only ever usng 15Mb of Disk space. So why did it refuse work when I had 4+ times that free?
I have no idea if this is a problem with E@H or the BOINC client, so I'll just assume it's the client as that's the thing that will do the maths.

Disk and memory usage
Use no more than 30 GB disk space
Set to a number near to the amount you have free

Leave at least 0.1 GB disk space free
Use this setting

Use no more than 85% of total disk space
Use this setting

Write to disk at most every 360 seconds
Your choice as to what setting to use

Use no more than 75% of total virtual memory
Use this settting

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BOINC Wiki

Write to disk at most every 360 seconds
Your choice as to what setting to use

Agree totally with Jim's recommendations, but a warning on this one - don't go much OVER 360 seconds, and if you have "leave in memory = no", I'd go much less. Even with "leave in memory = yes", I have this set at 60 seconds. My drive never spins down anyway, there's no need to limit BOINC's access to it. On the other hand, there's no need for some runaway application writing every 6 seconds or something, either.

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The write to disk interval is a bit misleading anyway, as this BOINC-Wiki article on checkpointing explains.

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Thankyou for the input.
However the point I was trying to make was that BOINC knew how much free space there was, but ignored it. These are the updated settings I was using (and am using now):

Use no more than 100 GB disk space
Leave at least 0.03 GB disk space free
Use no more than 50% of total disk space
Write to disk at most every 60 seconds
Use no more than 75% of total virtual memory

So when it was complaining about not enough disk space (60mb), it had orders to leave only 30mb (0.03gb) untouched. E@H only ever uses about 15mb (it's using 16.15 now). As such I don't see why it couldn't download work because the maths just doesn't work.

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