So for some time, I've had an issue on a Windows 7 box in which, if the screensaver has been running for a while, it takes an extremely long time to log back in and commence working. It takes several minutes just to get the desktop back, and a few more minutes before all the programs are functional again. Usually, Norton complains that "Windows service host is exhibiting very high disk activity" which explains the issue but has to be the most useless error message there is. Windows service host hosts a wide variety of processes, usually there are several copies of it running simultaneously for one purpose or another, and it isn't easy to discover what each of them is up to.

Nevertheless, I have a suspicion that BOINC might be involved. I suspended all running tasks and the problem disappeared.

So is there any way to make BOINC back out gracefully when I want to get back to work?

And while I'm asking questions, why is BOINC manager consistently among the top 2 or 3 processes for disk I/O even when all processes are suspended? What is it doing?

I should have said (tired):

BOINC version: 6.10.58
Tasks: Einstein@home, Milkyway@home, orbit@home, SETI@home, Cosmology@home (Can't tell which, if any, is the problem)
Videocard: Gigabyte nVidia 8600 GTS driver 8.17.12.7061, DirectX 11
OS: WIndows 7

I'm sorry PJ. I simply don't know. I'm not a Windows person. I do know that the beginning of E@H workunits are very disk intensive.

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Kathryn :o)

Well, I may have solved it though I'm not entirely sure how.

I forced an sync with Boincstats after making some minor tweaks to parameters to make sure it actually did something beyond just checking to see that nothing had changed.

For some reason, that seems to have fixed it for now. So I'm guessing that one or another parameter became corrupted somewhere along the way, but I can't imagine what.

Anyway, it seems to be happy for now.

Well, some more info.

The problem quickly reappeared so I spent some time suspending each project, one at a time. That pretty quickly localized the issue to Einstein@home.

Among your projects, Einstein tasks need pretty much memory (about 250 MB each). Could that cause the problem with your machine?

Have you set "Leave tasks in memory while suspended" to "yes" in your preferences?

Perhaps you should post at the Einstein forum. There we could also see the details of your computer.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

Yeah, now that I've narrowed it down to E@h, I should move the discussion over there.