[texas booster]

Any tweaks to make it crunch faster?

First, turn off screen savers and just allow the system to turn off the monitor after xx minutes of inactivity.

Heat is the biggest danger to computers. I run my main desktop at 100% with no heat problems, but I run all other desktops at 75% to 90%. Laptops I set to 50% to 70%, depending on their thermal characteristics.

I also run the Console version for XP, so that it continues to fold even if the system is at a login prompt. The console version seems to be about 10% faster than the GUI version, but the real help is that it always folds, logged in or not.

Adding more memory is always good, and it seems to fly when you have over 1 GB of RAM.

Thanks for waiting till morning for me to reply. What part of the world are you in that you are awake all night?

[Drango]

As TB has outlined, there isn't much you need to do to optimize your "folding". It comes out of the box, ready to go. The tweaks may help somewhat, but the bottom line is that the "speed" of folding is determined by your CPU. So if upgrading is option, go for it.

However, as this option costs, many of us find friends and relatives or work computers that we can add to our effort and results. (affectionately called "borging"; always ask the owner for permission before "borging" a 'puter.)

[Son Of The Godfather]

Thanks for waiting till morning for me to reply. What part of the world are you in that you are awake all night?

I'm in Camarillo, CA... I just work the hours of the creatures of the night. :)

[JCEccles]

Speaking of memory, I cannibalized my father's defunct Pentium 4 running at 1.8 GHz and replaced the motherboard and CPU with a cheap dual core Pentium D running at 2.66 MHz, loaded it with Novell's new SLED 10 SUSE enterprise desktop linux distribution, and set it to folding. But it was s-l-o-w. Finally I noticed at boot-up that the old DDR memory was running in single channel mode. I checked and discovered I had mismatched memory. I fixed that this morning with two matched DDR 400 512MB chips. It's folding like a champ now.

NOw I have to figure out how to set each core to folding separate from the other so that I effectively have two 2.66 MHz computers folding on one board.