When i booted into windows on my new lappy and did a virgin install of BOINC 5.8.0 it opened up into the new BOINC Simplified GUI (BSG). Linking it to www.worldcommunitygrid.org, entering User id and password was a breeze and away it went. Whilst sitting behind a 56k dial up, i've disabled HDC and just do FAAH and GC and set it to 1.0 days, so it buffers enough work for a daily refresh.

PS... new 5.8.0 feature for those who like to play with buffering large volumes of work. Suspended/buffered work is still counted for the cue i.e. it wont give extra work for local caching! If set to 1.0 days, u get that equivalent..like it or not.

As for those liking/not liking tweaking. Setting the BOINC "Write to disk at most every:" option to 999 seconds has reduced my disk i/o drastically on HDC.....that is with 1.5 gb ram. Else disk swapping is unavoidable with sometimes 1gb calculation models.

I have to agree with Eric-Montreal: I have noticed that my computers have slowed considerably, and I too finally tracked it down to UD/WCG agent. While the techno-geeks can discuss the work-arounds and tweaks, and using BOINC instead of UD, most, if not just about all of us, do not feel that we should have to dig into advanced settings, or install BOINC (what a nightmare - did it once - never again!).

I have a dual Athlon 2.3GHz machine running XP Pro SP2 and a PowerPC dual 1 GHz G4 running Mac OS 10.4.6, and had no trouble installing BOINC on either machine. I am using the latest release update on both machines and have never had any trouble with it.

However, since I rarely use it for anything useful other than testing out software for others, I wouldn't notice any slowdown from a particular project. It runs BOINC with projects Einstein@Home, SETI@home, SZTAKI Desktop Grid and World Community Grid set for all projects including betas, 24/7 for weeks at a time w/o even looking at it, since it shares my screen and keyboard with the Mac.

On the other hand, WCG still doesn't support BOINCstats BAM!, which I use on all projects, so I have to update my preferences on WCG by hand. That is my only complaint.

I think Eric's point is well made: If WCG is going to promote this as a non-intrusive, background task on volunteers computers, then it should work right out of the box with the default settings. This hard drive access has made my business computers annoyingly slow to the point of being unusable at times. And since it is my business and time that is being wasted waiting for the system, I'm pulling the plug on HDC project in my office during business hours.

What's particularly insidious about this issue is that I have put HDC on my most powerful computers (due to RAM requirements), and now those powerful computers will be idle 10 hours a day.

Who would have thought that the ultimate bottleneck would be I/O-related, rather than CPU limited?

Try BOINC and quit whinging.

(BTW, BOINC is not “malware” nor is the site “somewhat geeky” nor is it a “somewhat experimental version”. SETI is a project adopted (and until recently funded) by UCLA at Berkely. The BOINC software was written originally by Berkely programmers (remember Berkely BSD UNIX?) for seti@home, but is now being continually improved and upgraded as a manager for any and all distributed projects. The software quality is impeccable: the software source is impeccable. Unlike UD, it is continually being upgraded and improved and maintained, for many OS/CPU combinations.

George
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George W Gerrity
Mb:    +61 429 400 912
Skype: g.gerrity
Campbell, ACT 2612
Australia

I had disabled HDC as soon as it came out because it froze my computer completely for tens of seconds at a time every once in a while. After some time went by, I tried re-enabling it some weeks ago, and I can always tell that HDC is running because it started freezing again. I disabled HDC today again for good.

I run in an IBM T42 with 1GB RAM. I am running Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition 9.0.3.1000, and LavaSoft's Ad-Watch.

Because I run this on my work computer, there is no way I will install BOINC (great name).