World Community Grid - View Thread - Could it be that slow machines receive too many points?

retsof wrote:

Points must be a mechanism and reward for keeping slow machines out of the landfill and extending their usefullness, however strained.

A noble idea, but I'm not sure the power consumed by these old pc's is worth the results obtained. I'm not a "green" person by most measures but it seems to me that, given the cost of oil and energy in general today, it is more energy responsible to run intensive jobs like HPF on fast, efficient machines. As far as keeping old computers out of landfills, I'm all for that and there are many ways these machines can be utilized effectively. There are a lot of organizations for the elderly or less fortunate who would gladly accept old computers as donations. They would probably not be used for much beyond internet access or word processing anyway and virtually any old computer will do for these purposes.
As for myself, I retired my oldest and slowest pc (532Mhz Celeron) from crunching and gave it to a neighbor who needed it to help in a job search. The next oldest in my stable are a 1Ghz Athlon and a 1.1Ghz Duron. They may be pulled offline soon, at least temporarily, if the power bill gets too high.