Posted on 12/29/2005 8:34:56 PM PST by systematic
OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!!
We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.
That's awesome! Welcome to the FR team! Every single CPU helps!
It says 98. What does that mean?
Yes, you are correct. That said, the difference between idle and max cpu isn't that great. 50 watts or so isn't negligable. I suppose that most folks might see a rise in their home bill of 25 cents a month or more. If it's that critical to them, it's important they don't add folding.
Oh man.. now we're talking greek or something :). Doesn't vmware allow you emulate linux and windows programs, or am I completely out of my league here?
"System Idle Process" is just what it sounds like, idling; it means that 98% of your CPU cycles are being wasted.
I had a friend relate this analogy to me once: Let's say you have your photos developed at a 1-hour photo lab, 4 hours away. You drive there, have your pictures developed, and drive home. A total of 9 hours spent in order to get your photographs.
Let's say the photo lab became twice as fast... developing pictures in half the time, 30 minutes.
However, with the drive, it still takes you 8.5 hours to develop the photographs.
That's what I mean when I say that CPUs have not been the bottleneck for the average user for a long time. F@H works to make use of those idle CPU cycles, and will not cause your system to slow down at all.
Thanks for the info. I'll work on getting my older systems up and running again. They're just gathering dust right now, lol. It will take a week or 3 because of work constraints and reconfiguring the systems, (debug, format, reinstall Windows, firewall, & AV). They're slow, but won't have anything else running, so they might help out a little bit.
RT
What says 98, and repeat the question please... we must have missed something in shifting the threads over..
Dude! You rock! What do you run on it? They do have Linux installations.
I finally got off my duff and looked, and oddly, I think I might be able to get the Mac executable to work under AIX. I'll try it sometime soon when I have some free time. In the meantime, I d/l it and have it running under my 2 banger Windoze box.
Er, sorry, disregard my question. For some reason I confused AIX with Alpha dec boxes. *hides*
ahh... never mind, slap me... you're running windows 98, and
no, the program won't slow down your computer, unless you use
it for some heavy game programs.
If you do, then you just quit the client, and start it back up when you're through. But for standard web browsing, office, and other programs, you'll never even know it's there.
Currently, I'm using that box to create/modify a new app for work, kind of a side project. It's running AIX 5.3
Man, I haven't heard of Alpha DEC's in an age, are they even manufactured anymore?
OK - I'm running .... or rather folding
If that is your "system idle process" number, then your computer is using only 2% of the CPU power under ordinary circumstances.
The FAH client is pretty good about letting other processes get the CPU time they need. I run FAH on a machine I use for gaming and I have never noticed any problems. The games run as fast as every.
I don't know, but... only a couple of years ago I saw the inside a geek frat... and I mean GEEK... not a typo. Well, it wasn't an official fraternity, there were women there, just an entire dorm/club of geeks living together. Everyone in there was a computer major of some sort. And, it was the most amazing thing you'd ever seen. The typical member had about 4 boxes squirrelled in their tiny dorms, one had as many as 8 all together, server-type. Saw plenty of Alpha Decs... huge! They had a couple of server rooms with so many servers that it looked like something out of NASA. I'll never forget it.
If you want to run it on a laptop, you should scale back the % of CPU its allowed to consume, to keep your laptop from overheating. I was running it full out to stress test my new laptop and it fried. It was under warranty and I got a new motherboard, but I haven't fired up the program since. If I do I would scale it back.
Right click on the Red O that's down in your system tray, and select configure. Team number should be right about the center of the dialogue box that pops up. Just type in 36120, and hit ok, and when your job completes, it'll credit to you, and the FR team.
I once calculated it (for Seti@home) at about $7-$8/month for for 24/7 crunching on three machines versus 24/7 idling. Of course, I drive my boxes pretty hard anyway - I do a lot of video encoding and such - so my machines are hardly idling 24/7 anyway, meaning the difference was pretty negligible in the end. I suspect that spare cycles tend to be scarcer for me than a lot of folks, but YMMV :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.