Stig Mogensen wrote:

~misfit~ wrote:

Stig Mogensen wrote:

Yep...ben a member for  a year now!

My Pentium4 1,6ghz has been crunching at - I guess - 95% of the
time. I do a WU at 5h 46m. How is it possible that others do >10K
WUs faster than I've done my 1K WUs?

Is it possible that the braggs here, are owed to someone elses
processingpower? Ie, their employer?

Just curious....and a bit discouraged...:-(

Congratulations Stig!

Don't be discouraged my friend, In my first year of SETI I only did
about 30 WUs. I joined in '99 and started on a 486 DX2 66, then went
up to a Pentium 100, etc. For a lot of the last five years I've been
running the GUI (Screensaver) and it's an inefficient way to crunch.
I was using my PC most of the time, even if it was only a small
percentage of it's processing power, and the rest of the cycles were
wasted. I only recently had the confidence to try the CLI client and
since I did my WU throughput increased four-fold. (The name put me
off more than anything, CLI, Command Line Interface, I didn't want
to be typing commands in a DOS-style environment, I put that behind
me years ago. However, I've been using it for a while now and
haven't had to type any DOS-style commands. The Easy SETI CLI
package made it all effortless for me).

I have progressed from one machine. I currently have three PCs on my
account, (and two on my fiancee's account) it's become a bit of a
hobby. f/f george has already mentioned to you that he has 17
machines (a 'farm') at home, I'm getting a couple more myself soon.
It can become an obssesion. <g> Older machines can be got for low
prices, or built, or even donated (Thanks M). Computer hardware is
my hobby (I'm an invalid) and I enjoy building/fixing PCs. Once I've
got them going what am I going to do with them? Run SETI, that's
what! I've donated a few to friends, or for their children etc. but
they want monitors, speakers, CD drives, big HDDs, modems, OS's and,
worst of all, support. :-). It's far easier to just set them up
here, on an ethernet switch and KVM switches or somesuch, and run
SETI. It costs a little electricity but not many hobbies are free.

Some other people have access to PCs at their place of work and
install SETI on those, that's good too. After all, it should, first
and foremost be for the science, not about numbers (although the
numbers are fun too).

Everyone who crunches data for SETI is making a valuable
contribution, whether they are crunching two WUs a week or 200 a day.

Keep on crunching Stig, you're doing well. It took me four years to
get to 1,000 WUs.

Once again, congratulations!
--
~misfit~

Hey,

Thank you ;o) I've never run my seti client, in any other environment
than Linux. Right now it's a Gentoo Stage1, with a 2.4.26 vanilla
kernel....it's nice, smooth, fast and stable;o)

Aha, a Linux man. I keep meaning to get around to having a play with Linux,
haven't (seriously) yet.

I'll keep crunching, and see what my next computerupgrade will do for
the time it takes to process a WU.

Upgrades can do a lot. My main machine is an Athlon XP1800+ (T'bred B) that
I've had for a while. I bought a new motherboard for it a while back, an
nVidia nForce2Ultra400. Now, instead of running at 1.53Ghz and taking nearly
four hours per WU I have it running on a 200Mhz FSB and a 10.5 multiplier
for 2.1Ghz and it pumps out WU's in around 2 hours 23 minutes.

Have fun,
--
~misfit~