[fanfan]

you can always throttle it back a bit if you want it to use less.

I'm not all that good with computers. Would you mind explaining how I would do that? Just by not loading another WU, or some other way?

Checkpoints are written to the hard drive every 20-30 minutes or so.

Um, what?

[SC Swamp Fox]

1) By default, the program will use all of the available CPU cycles you are not using. In the unlikely event that this causes your CPU to run hot and interferes with your normal operation you can "throttle back" the program. This is an option when you configure, you can set it to use some number of cycles below 100%. (It folds proteins slower.) You can change the configuration any time you want. If you need help doing it, just let us know.

2) While folding, the program saves it's work to your hard drive periodically, so that if you shut down or lose power it doesn't have to start over from the beginning. The "saved work" file on my PC is taking up 407Kb. (Much less then any of my Ann Coulter pics.)

[ken in texas]

I'm not all that good with computers. Would you mind explaining how I would do that? Just by not loading another WU, or some other way?

This describes some of the screens you see when running the GUI version of the Folding@Home program (if you decide to run the console version someone else will have to provide examples; I don't run that version.)

When you right click on the System Tray icon for F@H and select "Configure...", the first screen will look something like this:

Of course, you'll have your own name there. Click on the "Advanced" tab, and you should see something like this:

You can change the CPU Usage Percent if you don't want F@H to use all of the available CPU time; however, it runs at a low priority so even if it uses all it can get you probably won't notice its effect. You can also adjust the slider for the Checkpointing frequency to determine how often F@H will write checkpoints to the hard drive. For example, with checkpoints written every 30 minutes, if your computer crashes you should never lose more than 30 minutes of work.