Hi legg,
I don't have any brilliant fixes for you. If you are willing to spend some time on this, try uninstalling and see if everything runs fine for a while. Then try reinstalling and see if the problem recurs. If so, try to give us a good description of your system, such as security software and network connection. Any peculiar video?

Since I don't have any specific ideas, I am likely to ask for all sorts of information to see if something clicks. For example, would you try just running one project for a while? If that causes the problem to recur, switch to a different project and abort the old work unit, just to be sure that the problem is not caused by the application program.

Lawrence

Yes it was, by Contact amongst others. Check the Alpha test summary to see that even 6.2 is tested on Win98.

Dust and heat, heat and dust, those are mostly causes for hangs in Windows 98, afaik. So do check the inside of the case, the heat sink on the CPU and all fans, make them dust free.

After running unattended without incident overnight, the machine froze while formating text to this (a previous attempt.....) message.

While familiar with heating problems, I believe, from inspection and from the previous 30 day/overnight operating record, that this is not the issue. I seem to have no alternative but to uninstall and, possibly, to attempt a reinstall with this or some previous rev of the BOINC agent. The option of setting BOINC to run only when the computer is not being used no longer seems to be an option, while screen-saving actvtity is disabled. UD seemed to run in the background without issues.

BOINC seems to be the only flavour of distributed computing on offer at present, and trashing the operating system has implications that I am not presently interested in considering, for reasons that I am not interested in discussing here.

In the past, it was my observation (around Y2K) that running distributed computing projects in the background contributed to the stability of the nascent Microsoft OS; not otherwise.

Attempts to migrate to BOINC on W98 systems over the past year have consistently proven to be disruptive, regardless of the revision. I note that BOINC still runs reliably on W2K or XP machines, only when disabled from it's originally-advertised screensaving role. This would have been my first option if problems appeared running the distributed computing SW with another application - but is one I haven't had to resort to for some years.

One question - re CPU throttling:

I note that the report of CPU activity is sensitive to reporting refresh rate. An illustration of the differences in 4-second and 1-second report refresh rates on a 60% throttle setting is posted at:

http://www.magma.ca/~legg/TVS/0805291154-5sec.gif

Perhaps this apparently irregular CPU use profile is only an artifact of the reporting method, but it does beg the question - are the peaks real and If real, what effect on simple PC function?

I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about troubleshooting this problem in W98 if I saw any progress whatsoever in beating the screensaving bugs that are everpresent in the more popular W2K or WXP applications.

RL

Are you suggesting that installing BOINC 6 is a possible solution to the current problem in this W98 2ed machine?

I appreciate that the throttling method employed has heat reduction benefits. I had not been applying it with that benfit in mind - it was my experience that unthrottled CPU usage tended to slow down any other application, reflected as simple unbearably slow or erratic keyboard or mouse response. The extreme instance of 'slow response' was assumed to be a system freeze. I will leave this option unaltered from the current 60%, in any event.

I've uninstalled BOINC from this machine and installed it in a UD-converted slower (~750MHz) W98 PIII machine that sees infrequent 'user interference'. This should establish some run time history, albeit at a sluggish pace.

When there's more time to fool around and I'll retry it in this one.

RL

This is wrong. While BOINC can, sometimes, cause memory or disk contention (sometimes causing a slow response) CPU doesn't have the same problem.

Ageless wasn't suggesting you try BOINC 6. I don't either.