I posted to the FAQ the other day trying to get an answer on how to limit seti
to one or the other processors at boot, and got no reply thru the FAQ. I tried
to post the below to the FAQ. Those using a machine with more than 1 processor
can give seti one of the processors, and not lose any noticeable performance.
I've made more progress in 3 days with this p4 than in the 6 years prior with
the P1.
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I mentioned that seti was a processor hog even at low priority the other day.
Went and found a working solution.
if you have a machine using multiple processors you can set seti up to use one
processor alone. 
I was really bogging with seti having unlimited use of the machine . P4 3.2 ghz
was running like my P1 166 mhz. Checking the performance it showed seti at
99-100% usage, and the performance also running at 100%
Anyway's here's the solution I found
http://www.appliedvisual.com/
it's a free program that sets the affinity on programs.
I had a hard time getting it to run. the trick was to install xcpu in the path.
with me it was the windows/system32 directory.
wouldn't make much sense to even run seti if I selected only to run it while
the screen savers on.
I haven't seen the screen saver since I set it up on the machine.
I would have posted this in a forum, but figured it'd get buried there. This
[the FAQ] was where I looked to find a way to run seti that didn't make using
the machine impossible while it was running.

anyone know how to tell seti about this program ?
This came from the FAQ.

Why are you doing this as a screensaver instead of a background task that runs all the time? 
SETI@home uses a lot of memory while it's running, and it would cause swapping on some computers. We want to make sure it has zero impact on your normal computer work. So, for PC and Mac, the default mode is screensaver. 

However, if you already have a favorite screensaver, or prefer not to run a screensaver, SETI@home can also be run as a background program that computes all the time and has no graphics. The UNIX version works like this. 

using this xcpu program accomplishes this without having to run seti as a
screen saver. 

more pix @ http://members.toast.net/cbminfo/index.html