Old computer are still old computer and often power inefficient. It's because the Rice jobs run fixed 8 CPU hours and have very small system requirements that they are perfect for part time crunchers even on P3 with Windows 98SE. Leaving very old machines on 24/7 just to crunch these is in ratio to the number of Units of Data versus Electricity not best practice.

JmBoullier summarized it in this post:

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/printpost?post=165999

My recommendation is to choose the specially created WCG Power Saving profile. The client will then pause after 20 minutes of none keyboard/mouse use (default). After that if the computer has a sleep mode feature it will automatically switch off. This facilitates crunching in background that nobody notices, yet with very very little extra electricity allows volunteer participation in the maximum green way. Walk away or forget the computer and it will go to sleep.

That said: If the member wishes to let these machines run longer, these contributions are equally much appreciated in furthering the research into better rice types.

ciao

Sek and Ady-

You know, I am sure you are right about power. But, I live in a leaky 100 year old colonial, with power everything; two refrigerators; four entertainment systems, not on all at once, but there if I want to go room to room; central air. We try to shut out lights when we leave rooms, but we are far from green. I am told that the cost of runnng my PIII laptop, 1 gig CPU, 512 megs DRAM is about the cost of a 100 watt bulb in the same time period. If that is true, then I am not going to diminish my crunching for saving power.

And, I am not in it for points, credits, etc. I am in it because I love it, because it is a way for me to give back, to contribute to society in a global way, a society which has given me much. I love SETI, I really love C.E.R.N.; protein folding may be our best answer to many ills; my family has been touched by Cancer-whose has not? Pulsars and the Milky Way are cool.

And, I love screen savers!! So, I run them. They are "cool", and, witness Rice, just getting cooler.

So, let me know if I am nuts.

Here is a real question, I was going to post elsewhere (where?). I am running HCC on my dual cores. I do not want to run HCC on m my PIII's, but I do want to run Rice on them. I looked for settings and could not find any. My PIII's are not showing up yet in My Devices because they just went back on WCG last night and have not finished anything.How and when can I configure it so that I run HCC and Rice on the dual cores, and just Rice on the PIII's?

I mean, you know, I could do the PIII's under a different ID, but that screws up my CPID, and I want to live under one roof.

So, unless I am wrong about the light bulb thing, I will just plod on, 24/7/365 on 2 PIII's, 165 hrs/week on one Core 2 Duo, 135 hrs/week on another Core 2 Duo.

Many thanks, I speak for the whole army out here, for the hours you and your colleagues put in keeping us afloat.

>>RSM

Yep.....your nuts!!

...but then again many of us here are

Well, if it's nuts to run P-III's, then I'm totally balmy.

I've been running P-III's for years under Grid.org and now WCG. Eight of them still crunch away 24/7. Mind you, 3 of them are Tualatins which have more zip than most early versions of P-IV's. Nobody wants slow P-III's, so they may as well sit here and keep my room warm.