A change was made to set the default download to BOINC, but you noticed that ALL pieces were not changed in the directions. Since BOINC is running well, I think they are going to stay with BOINC rather than pay UD for an unproven upgrade.

VERY good point!

BTW, as I suspected Discovering Dengue Drugs Together also can run on a P4 w/128MB of RAM and 1GB of virtual memory

From reading the threads in many posts like this one, it becomes apparent that many people are leaving computers running with the sole purpose of crunching for world community grid. This is at great cost to the environment, and computers (like all electrical items) should only be left running when in use.

It is pointless running applications which predict the climate change in africa, if the process of doing so will contribute to it, i.e. the increase of fossil fuels required to generate electricity to power computers. It is madness to run 20 or so low end machines to crunch on these projects, when the work could easily be done by a single high end machine at a fraction of the cost to the user and the environment.

All of my machines, and my friends, run world community grid applications when in use, and some do run 24/7, but only because they are required for other applications.

It is often said that people do not crunch for points, but lets be honest, we all do check them to see how we are doing. I have accumulated 1,347,226 points in total, just by running world community grid in the background whilst using my machine. People should consider if they are here to work on cures for diseases which affect humanity, or whether they are here to accumulate as many points as possible at whatever cost.

I urge all people to consider the implications of running WCG 24/7 on the environment.

crook_uk,

You posted off topic, your item fitting in many other threads on the energy concerns topic.

1. The science has to be done and it's better to do it on existing machines rather than building new computer centres, which in itself costs considerable fabrication and assembly energy even before starting.
2. WCG only wants idle time when anyone's computer is on for other reasons but crunching. A so called Power Saving profile is being added soon to the WCG pre-defined selection as Device Manager profile selection.
3. Running 24/7 is a way of doing a charitable contribution. In the end the crunching has to be done, so little real addition of energy consumption takes place.

Your third paragraph sums it up, how large groups go about contributing to WCG, but am *not* critiquing anyone who contributed to speed things up by running longer or 24/7. Points are for fun and games and a translation of time contributed and computing power utilised, same as counting the number of completed results, which to many is much more satisfactory as is the accumulation of the amount of run time. Got almost 4 years tallied up and in the top 3170 league.... hurray

cheers