Used to be a member??? WorldCommunityGrid DOES have FightAids@Home as one of the projects. I'm not sure what you used to run or actually are running now if WCG as a whole is slowing it down. Could it be Rosetta/HPF? That or both projects are the only two other choices at the moment.

The computer usage seems backwards from what I would expect. Most of us turn off the screensaver because it takes about 10% of the crunching effort to move the graphics around. We crunch 24/7 in the background. It is still possible to expand the icon and watch graphics to see what is going on, especially near the time of transmitting data.

You did check your task manager. What other high priority tasks are taking a major percentage? A game?

What kind of system and operating system do you have and how much memory is on it?

That explains it. Things must have improved with the AutoDock program in use here. My dialup has no problem at all with the tiny 50,000 BYTE download files. Rosetta/HPF download files for the other project are nearly 1 megabyte each and it can take up to 10 minutes for an upload/download. Sending up to 10 FA@H workunits in 1/2 hour is easy.

Chuck --

Do you run any kind of spyware removal program regularly? If not, several are mentioned in the Useful Utilities FAQ.

If spyware is not the problem, the most likely cause of your system slowing when you are running the World Community Grid would be paging. The software is written so that it runs at the idle priority -- that is the lowest possible priority on your system and the Grid software will always yield to any other work on your system. While it will run at 95 to 98 percent utilization on your system, that is only because any of the processes you are running do not need the processor 95 to 98 percent of the time. However, if your system is tight on real memory, your applications and the Grid application may be thrashing pages in and out of memory. Since the application you are using must wait for the page to be read into memory in order to use it and since the disk I/O is very slow compared to the speed of the processor, the effect will be to slow down everything on your system, including the application you are using.

it does sound like some of the 'continuous' anti-virus stuff i saw before. i think it's ok to turn off the 24 hr/day part of it. or as said above, switch to AVG or AVASTI.

This is typically evidence of not enough physical RAM on your machine. Fight AIDS allocates roughly 280MB of virtual memory and if you don't have enough RAM, will cause your computer to start paging. The less RAM you have the more paging occurs. Paging slows the computer down quite noticably. However, after a little bit, Windows will permanently swap out portions of the allocated memory and your performance should go back to normal.

How much RAM does your computer have?

If it's noticable and interferes with your normal usage, running it only as a screensaver is a good choice. You can also set up a custom profile to run it during only certain hours (e.g. 6pm - 6am).