Posted on 08/02/2006 5:16:19 PM PDT by texas booster
Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread.
Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE).
Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1009 active CPUs - 55,700 completed Work Units and 9.75 million points).
This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the links posted below (or read one of the previous 20 folding threads)
...and it was considerably more fun than passing a kidney stone...
Just an odd, stream-of-consciousness sort of thought.
Okay, so now I'm using the console version--does that mean I don't get to see the pretty pictures?
Regrettably, yes, it means you don't get to see the pretty pictures. The ability of the GUI client to generate those images was the source of the video problem that you had.
On the upside, though, you WILL be able to make an active and positive contribution to a valuable area of research, you'll still rack up points for yourself and for the FR team, and you'll now be able to do it AND use other applications on your computer simultaneously.
Congrat's on getting the console launched. Yeah, it's boring, but it gets the job done.
What about when my drive sounds like a blender? Is that normal?
Ironically, we just through a blender away because it sounded like a harddrive.
I got my main box (a P-IV 1.8Gz) running 95% on folding. The other 5 % is reserved for Freeping.
I plan on setting up my other machine in a few days (P-III 600Mhz). My kids will probly complain that its taking speed away from their precious MSN but thats too bad.
Any little tricks you know to help out is greatly appreciated. I can feel that competetive thing showing its ugly head again. I will try not to get as strung out on Folding as I did on Seti.
I'm assuming you mean continuous noise like a blender makes when running. Some drives do make a fair amount of noise just spinning. Also, some drives make a fair amount of noise when they're accessing data, but that shouldn't be a continuous thing unless the files on your drive are very fragmented or your drive is very full. Only in those cases might a drive "rattle" too much as it reads and writes data. If neither of those is the case, get a backup drive prepared and make the swap before the current one croaks.
In the old days, you could use a utility like Ghost to make a perfect "image" of one drive on another. Then, if the first drive failed, that backup drive could be swapped in and your system would boot right up. Not so XP. If you think your hard drive may be giving up on you, be diligent to make printed instructions as to how to proceed in making a swap. There is a preparation step that has to be done first or your system may not boot up afterward. You might get luck, but most don't, so don't risk it.
Turn in your O/S Bilbe to the Book Of Bill, and obey all of the commandments therein conveyed regarding drive swaps.
OR, call your favorite guru to do it all for you.
The sound may be coming from your CPU fan.
It's either that, or the gerbils are going into respiratory failure
No need to throttle FAH, unless you are having heating problems. You won't see much difference between 95% & 100%, but every little bit helps.
FAH plays nice so that it only uses idle CPU cycles. I can Freep, listen to music, and Fold at the same time with FAH set at 100% with no sign of a problem. I have to check the task manager to make sure it is running.
"What about when my drive sounds like a blender? Is that normal?"
No, it's not normal. If the sound is as you describe (loud grinding noise), then the drive is thrashing, which means the mechanical reading head of the drive is jumping rapidly back and forth across the disk surface as it looks for the data. This almost always indicates a badly fragmented drive.
When data is written to the disk, the operating system (Windows) causes the data to be written in the first blank space and if that blank space is not large enough to hold all the data, then to jump to the next blank space and continue writing. What this means is that a large file can get broken into very tiny chunks and scattered all over the hard drive - kind of like playing 52 card pick-up with 3 or 4 strong fans blowing the cards all over the room.
The more fragmented your hard drive is, the slower your system seems to operate, because it takes longer and longer to locate all those little chunks of data. You should defrag your hard drive at least 3 or 4 times a year. Some people do it more often. Look up defrag in Windows Help section for more info on how to do this.
Don't worry that your hard drive may be broke - it's not, but it will wear out faster if you don't periodically defrag the drive. Oh, yeah, one more thing. Before you start the defrag, stop the FAH service (use services in Admin. Tools) and plan on not using the computer for the rest of the day. Depending on the size of the drive and amount of memory and CPU speed, it could take anywhere from 3 or 4 hours up to 24 hours.
Just FYI, installing and running FAH did not cause this - it just made the already existing problem more apparent.
Now you also need to know how to track the progress of your folding. I recommend that you send Egon a FReepmail and ask him for the link to download his monitor program. He wrote it specifically for us FReepers and it's free. Look through the thread and you'll see some posts to him, or you could just ping him for more info.
Good Luck,
RT
Thanks for the "thanks".
Glad to be a part of this endeavor.
Too quiet...
Indeed.
Team note:
#73 today, #72 by the first cup of coffee in the morning.
Lots and Lots of new users, who are off and running.
http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&a=2&t=36120
#2?! wow! Looks like I need to add another CPU to get #1 - lol
We should be in the Top50 in 200 days :)
Team Radar
http://fahstats.com/tr.php?t=36120
Team Member stats:
http://fahstats.com/t.php?t=36120
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