Lawrence, I would want to protect myself from bugs and security holes in BOINC itself, as well as possible problems with the WCG supplied binaries.

It's just good practice.

Well, at least you made an honest effort. That's a lot more than a lot of people would do - myself included.

It may be the best outcome anyway. I don't think laptops are designed to run at full load 24/7. they have much smaller heatsinks that get clogged easily and tend to be used in environments where there is more activity and therefore more dust. Most people won't pop their desktop case to clean a heat sink and they wouldn't even think of taking a laptop apart. I build a couple desktops a year and I still don't like touching a laptop.

But before the laptop people revolt, I know there are a lot of lappies out there crunching and for all I know, they may be able to handle a full load with a clogged heatsink.

I'm just saying don't worry about it and thank you!

Well, whaddya know!

I ran chkdsk and scannow and reinstalled BOINC (yet again).

It works completely, no more molasses mode!

I think scannow did the trick, a great tune up for the other computer as well!

Thanks theitshop and everyone else.

Dan

There are a number of things that could be wrong with your machine. As has already been mentioned it is worth looking in Task manager at the processes tab and seeing what is running. It is worth mentioning that when you shut down the boinc manager it does not stop the science applications from running unless you tell it to, so it could be that even after you've shutdown the client your computer could still be crunching.

Do you have more than one anti-virus program installed? If so you are wasting system resources which could be causing problems. Also certain anti-virus programs are particularly draining on resources especially norton. If you have a subscription with norton it may be worth considering a different anti-virus package if your subscription is close to expiring. AVG free is very good and combined with windows firewall will do the same job as norton's internet security. It is also worth running windows update to make sure everything on your system is up to date.

You say the computer doesn't come out of calculation. Are you running boinc in screensaver mode? If so it might be worth disabling the screensaver and just have boinc running when computer is idle. You can limit the %age of CPU time each inidividual computer uses under the preferences option in the manager.

If you have a lot of background services running you could try disabling some at startup. To do this go to start, run and type in msconfig. Under the services and startup tabs you can disable unneccassary services. Be careful what you disable though, leave the microsoft services alone.

It might also be worth looking at your available page file, the area windows uses on the hard drive in place of RAM when the machine is running short on physical memory. If you want to increase this setting right click on My Computer, click on properties. Click on the advanced tab, then under performance click settings. You will be able to change the page file settings from here as well as enable/disable visual effects which might have an adverse affect on your machine.

You might want to take a look in the device manager to check your drivers are all working fine. Right click on my computer, click manage then select device manager from the list on the left hand side. Look for any devices with a yellow exclamation mark next to them as this indicates a driver/device problem.

Theitshop mentioned running a hard drive diagnostic tool. You can acquire the toshiba diagnostic tool from their drivers website:
http://eu.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innova...ivers_bios.jsp?service=EU
The drop down menu's will need to be set to: notebook, Satellite Pro, P series, Pro P200, pspb7e, your OS and finally driver type to pc diagnostic tool. Once installed you should be able to check for hardware faults with your machine.

Lastly, (sorry about the long post) if all else fails you can try the Microsoft fall back option: reinstall your operating system. Can seem a bit drastic but as long as you can make backups for your data and you still have your microsoft product keys and discs (including office if you have it installed) it can fix a lot of problems. If you're running XP you will also need to make sure you can get hold of the drivers for your machine as well as it doesn't always find them.

Hope this is of some help

Simply open op the Windows Display applet and in the screensaver selection box pick "empty" (or blank) and tick password box. Then you have one that eats zero CPU time.