I have searched the forums, and the main site, but have been unable to find the system requirements. Are they the same as the BOINC system requirements (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/SystemRequirements), or do they differ?
I have two fairly old PCs:
WinXP-SP2
Pentium III
1GHz
256MB RAM.
Are these up to the job?
I\'ve never installed the BOINC software before. Is it possible to prevent the software from running at particular times?
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I have searched the forums, and the main site, but have been unable to find the system requirements. Are they the same as the BOINC system requirements (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/SystemRequirements), or do they differ?
I have two fairly old PCs:
WinXP-SP2
Pentium III
1GHz
256MB RAM.
Are these up to the job?
I\'ve never installed the BOINC software before. Is it possible to prevent the software from running at particular times?
Yes I think it will just work, BUT if you don\'t let it run 24/7 it may not. There is a 3 day time limit for most units here at Malaria and if you don\'t return them within that time frame you probably will nto get credit for crunching the unit. There ARE some highly unique circumstances where you still will get credit but don\'t count on it! Yes you can tell the Boinc software when to run and when not to run. But as I said with a 1ghz pc you may be pushing the limit. Also your 256 meg of ram is fairly low and will slow down your pc to some degree.
You can always sign up and then if it doesn\'t work, not worry too much about it and just set the software to not allow any new work to be sent to you. All units not returned on time are automatically sent out ot other pc\'s for crunching. You can start out initially with say 0.5 days of cache and that way you will only get one or two units.
There are LOTS of other Boinc Projects http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html so you could also check the list for some that don\'t take as much computing power as the newest pc\'s can provide.
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I didn\'t realise there are so many BOINC projects, I had only looked at the ones on the BOINC website.
I\'ll try on one PC that can run BOINC 24-hours a day, and see how I get on. I\'ll probably be adding another 256MB of RAM to the other PC in an attempt to avoid having to buy a new one. This one will only be able to run BOINC for 12 hours a day, so might not be much use for Malariacontrol.
Thanks for your help.
http://www.robdickson.co.uk/blog
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I didn\'t realise there are so many BOINC projects, I had only looked at the ones on the BOINC website.
I\'ll try on one PC that can run BOINC 24-hours a day, and see how I get on. I\'ll probably be adding another 256MB of RAM to the other PC in an attempt to avoid having to buy a new one. This one will only be able to run BOINC for 12 hours a day, so might not be much use for Malariacontrol.
Thanks for your help.
http://www.robdickson.co.uk/blog
No problem, I hope it works out for you. There are more and more Boinc Projects coming on-line all the time, there are MANY more now than even just one year ago.
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Krunchin-Keith [USA]Volunteer moderator
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You should be able to run. It wil lhelp BOINC if you set your preferences.
Set your connect interval to 1 day and additional work to 0.01, this should give you less that 24 hours of work but still eb able to complete some each day and return it within the 3 day deadline. You may have to adjsut these some but I think this should work.
It would also help if you set the only run between hours for what ever hours these 12 are, so BOINC knows it will not be on the full time. This will help BOINC in requesting work to complete in the time it will be on before the work\'s actual deadline of 3 days so it will not be overdue.
Since you have 1 computer you can run full time and 1 only 12 hours, you can use venues so each computer has a different setting.
In your preferences you have 4 venues, set the above under say the \'work\' venue, then when you connect the 12 hour computer, go to computers under your account and select the computer, at the bottom is a box to change the venue, change it to work. Leave the 24 hour one on default or \'---\' or change it to home and set the home venue setting for how you want that one to run.
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I have dual core cpus with plenty of memory, disk space, and basic speeds. My question is there a way to lower the program (Boinc) priority within XP? When running, it is very difficult (slow) to get other programs to run. It takes forever to get them to function... always very slowly. I looked around with XP but don't see anything other than to XP give priority to program execution. The crunching requirements of Boinc just seem to suck my computer dry.
Anyone! thanks John
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I have dual core cpus with plenty of memory, disk space, and basic speeds. My question is there a way to lower the program (Boinc) priority within XP? When running, it is very difficult (slow) to get other programs to run. It takes forever to get them to function... always very slowly. I looked around with XP but don't see anything other than to XP give priority to program execution. The crunching requirements of Boinc just seem to suck my computer dry.
Anyone! thanks John
Boinc is designed to run your cpu at 100% load, backing off automatically whenever you want to do something else with your pc. It does this but not instantly and not always to the degree we would like. It will probably never let you play games at a reasonable level when it too is running, but does have a button you can click on to 'snooze' for a 2 hour increment built in. Do a right click on the Bonc icon in the taskbar and it is right there for you to click on. MOST Boinc projects honor this, although there are a couple that do not, FreeHal comes to mind as one that does not. There is also a setting you can change that lets you use less than 100% of your cpu, DO NOT USE THIS! The setting is 'use at most ?% of cpu time', please ignore this and leave it at 100%!! It can cause problems with Boinc itself. You CAN use though the hours of the day setting so Boinc won't crunch during the daylight hours for instance but you will have to be careful of your cache settings to make sure you don't get too much work. Boinc is ALWAYS the lowest priority thing running on your pc, unless you have too many cached workunits and it thinks you can't get them back on time. Then it ups the priority to a higher one, you will see units running at high priority when this happens in the Tasks bar.
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