Late Saturday night I installed
World Community Grid software on my newest desktop. After two full days of run time: thumbs-up.
As of this morning my device has returned eight results: three for
FightAIDS@Home (homepage
here), two for
Human Proteome Folding Phase 2, one for
Help Defeat Cancer, and two I'm not sure of because the jobs ran from start to finish while I was sleeping or working or running errands or out at a christening and luncheon on Sunday. It's 76% done with some more work for Human Proteome Folding 2 right now. If I decide to, I can set my preferences so that my device works only on certain projects, but I've left it at the All Projects default for now, because I don't want my machine to sit idle if it queries for more work and my chosen project doesn't happen to have any at that moment.
The computer doesn't seem to be running appreciably hotter (I left the
CPU throttle at the current default of 60%), and I haven't noticed any effect on other applications. The interface/screensaver has a duration-configurable Snooze button, and I can set the application to run only when the screensaver kicks in, but so far it's been problem-free running all the time, and I'll probably open the throttle.
I feel quite virtuous, and much better about leaving the machine on when I'm off doing other things, and I'm very glad I heard about this and decided to participate. Thanks for the heads-up, Dan!
If anybody around here feels like joining forces to start a team, let me know. I'm user
IronGall over there.
A couple of posts I found useful/interesting in the WCG forum are
this one (and the one it links to) about hibernation in Windows XP (to avoid losing work because of a reboot),
this one about electricity cost, and
this one about dual-core processors and the UD Windows client versus BOINC (worth reading before downloading and installing a client).
Edit to add: This post is a spam attractor for some reason, along with the Gilhoolie post, so I started logging spam IPs because I'm just curious like that. 24.3.221.48.