So i borrowed a meter from my electric company. At 100% utilization and the lid closed (= monitor off), the Megabook drains a constant 37 watts. If my math is correct, that's 0,888 kWh per 24 hours of usage. With the electricity costs around here that totals somewhere around 4 € per month to keep it running 24/7. I doubt i'm qualified to judge whether the few dozen monthly results it delivers are "worth" 4 € to me or anyone else, but it's the kind of a sum i wouldn't notice if someone took from my pocket every now and then. So i suppose there's no downside in contributing it to these projects.

My desktop on the other hand drains about ~190 watts under pressure from BOINC which would result in a 20 € increase in monthly costs. Considering my current situation i can't do that. I think i'm going to try and dig up another used laptop instead.

kateiacy, thanks for the idea!

edit: stupid brain, at least try and get the math right..

If you do get worried about heat, use tthrottle. It works great.

I was also give 6 more Dell P3 laptops. All were Latitude C510 and C610's which are pretty much all interchangeable. They even use the same drivers. So, I built 2 good ones out of the various parts and have them now crunching for stress testing. They should make someone a decent email/homework computer. If I kept them, they would just be hooked up to the TV for streaming videos. But, they are 1.2GHz and 1GHz respectively.

I agree - it's not so much "what is too slow?" as "what is too inefficient?", and that's a personal decision.

I like to keep my old machines crunching for as long as possible, and I hate to throw away a working computer that could be crunching. I have a number of old machines, including several single-core file-servers. Some of them are nearly a decade old, and going strong. I keep expecting some of them to die of old age, but I'm afraid I'll probably end up powering some of them down before then to cut our electricity bill.