You might try defragmenting your disc. Move the shortcut to the UD agent out of your Startup folder so it doesn't restart when you reboot, then reboot and let defrag run overnight.

But that's just a guess, tell us more about your system first, eg. free space on your disc, what projects you run, what other apps you run. Also, you could run UD in screensaver mode so it won't run until it sees you are not active on the computer. You might have to let it run 24 hrs. a day to get much crunching done but if that works for you...

Thanks for your suggestions. I've defragged my drive twice now just to make sure and will hope that helps. I didn't know about the screensaver mode, so that's great in case it becomes an issue.

I have a 40Gb drive with 15Gb of free space. I have all the projects selected, so I guess it randomly chooses. I did notice that it was working on a cancer project when the hard drive was being accessed.

The other apps that I run are Firefox (latest release), Netscape 7.2, Outlook 2003, Excel 2003, Yahoo Messenger, Trillian, AVG Anti-virus, Ghost 9 (only backs up at night), and RealVNC server (to access my pc remotely).

I have noticed that it still seems to be accessing the hard drive quite a bit (after the defrags), but I'll just put it into sleep mode.

Thanks,
Andrew

Thanks for your insights. I actually like the idea of being able to participate in all of the projects and can just put the computer that I'm working on into "sleep mode" if the cancer project is running.

It does seem better now that I've defragged the drive, but the drive is accessed enough that I notice some slowdown when the cancer project is running (not all the time, but sometimes).

If you're interested, I'll give you the specifics of my pc:

Dell Latitude X300 - Pentium M 1.2GHz
Windows XP sp2 reports (under system properties) that I have 1.11Gb RAM

Using the task manager with all my apps running, I have:
Physical Memory
Total - 1169448
Available - 356300 (about)
System Cache - 457800 (about)

Kernel Memory
Total - 78796
Paged - 63972
Nonpaged - 14824

Totals
Handles - 17318
Threads - 698
Processes - 65

Commit Charge
Total - 1030900 (about)
Limit - 2802464
Peak - 1252656

I have only one drive configured which is listed as 40Gb with 15Gb free. I actually have a faster drive in mine than most X300's (5200 RPM).

I really like the idea of being able to use my computers to help with their processing power that's not being used otherwise. This has been a great forum with all of your responses. Finding out about the "sleep mode" is great in case something like what I was experiencing happens again. My pc is now working on an AIDS project, so only CPU is being used (which I can't even notice).

I believe that the video is integrated into the motherboard (I can't imagine how they'd fit in in this tiny package otherwise), so I'm guessing that it takes about 128Mb of my RAM.

Hi,

since you are running W/XP the cause could be that "automatic defrag" cuts in automatically.

This is what happens on my PC's: when XP detects no user activity for some time, harddisk activity suddenly starts, because Defrag is loaded. I found out by turning of my screen saver and starting task manager; then turn to the processes list and click the CPU column twice, i.e. to sort it descending by activity level. Then do nothing with either mouse or keyboard for a while (>10 mins); then you see defrag.exe comming up. On a 40Gb PC it is finished after about 30 mins. But 10 minutes after the last user activity (a single mouse move would do), it starts again.

So, when you run the WCG agent in screen saver mode, it might be that the activity comes from defrag and not the client. I don't know how to turn off this automatic defrag, but I also could not think of a good reason to do so.

I hope this helps,

Marco