On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 17:44:46 GMT, stanmc <stanmcnOspam@ameritech.net>
wrote:

Seti@home was my first distributed experience, and I learned a lot. I've 
done 2,500 WUs, and dedicated 9561 hours 27 minutes and 16 seconds in 
two years and three months (approximately). Unfortunately, I've been 
trying so hard to get my numbers up/down that I have not used my 
computer for the things for which it was originally intended. I don't 
use FS2004 or other games because they ruin the performance of Seti. 
I've been trying to get my average time per WU down closer to what it is 
running at now (2 hours 38 minutes to around 3 hours 18 minutes). I've 
had three different processors and two different MoBos since starting 
Seti. The Duron 1.0 ran it in 5 or 6 hours. The Athlon 1.4 ran a work 
unit in 4.5 to 5 hours. The Barton running at 2.1GHz runs it in 2.5 to 
3.25. I've also strained to get my average WUs per day to better than 3.0.

Well, I know I still use my (main) puter for other things too (what I
bought it for, and I never bought it to get better credits @ Seti).
If one looks @ the original idea about Seti@home, sometimes I feel
like laughing. The idea WAS to use as much as unused CPU power there
would be available in the world to crunch the huge amount of data they
gathered. Unused CPU power. So it was a screensaver which did just
that. The GUI version used some CPU to display the graphics so most
ppl went to the cmd-line client, which is more effective. Today
there's a bunch of ppl trying very hard to get to the top 1% of
crunchers, going bananas when their OS wants to do regular stuff like
defrag or something, coz it messes up the Seti performance. 
I think it's nice to get some kinda ranking element in Seti, it will
push ppl. It's plain stupid when you won't use FS2004 any longer
because it would ruin your stats. I don't run FS2004, but I run
FlightGear, Fly, Propilot a lot. So if I do that, I quit SetiDriver to
stop the crunching on that one and after the flight I kick it back in.
That way the unit-time won't be affected, it only takes longer to get
the unit done. And yes, it affects my result-interval, but what da
hell. 

Happy crunching

Louis