On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 22:03:48 -0500, Uncle Buck
<UncleBuck@SpamMeNot.com> wrote:

On 25 Dec 2004 18:25:25 -0800 in alt.sci.seti, "mycol"
<groverredrover@hotmail.com> defied the status quo and scrawled upon
the toilet stall:

Howdy...I recieved my first workunit a few days ago. Computer has been
on almost constantly. Screensaver says 61% completed and CPU time is 31
hours and 45 minutes. At this rate it will about four days to complete.
I do not normally use the computer for more than a few hours a day, so
I do not believe it will be of any use to seti as there are others with
much faster computers than a dell p3 700mhz with 128mb of ram running
om win 2000. Is this a normal amount of time for a workunit to be
completed?

<de-lurk>

Hi, new to this forum though not new to seti@home itself.  Nice to
meet y'all.  :-)

Anywho, in my own experience, processing speed depends a lot on what
other applications you might have running.  If you have a lot of tray
icons, that will slow it down.  If your system is scheduled to do any
maintenance at regular intervals, that can slow it down.  Virus or
firewall programs also slow it down.  If you only let it run while
you're on the computer, that will also slow it down a good bit.

I had a 555 MHz computer with about 164MB RAM, and it would generally
complete a work unit in about 20 hours (though it _could_ go as fast
as 15 or 16).  The best thing you can do as far as the amount of
computer time Seti@Home shows is to only run it when you're not using
the computer.  However, if you just want to get the work units done as
quickly as possible in _real_ time, that's probably not a good idea.
There are some things you can do to speed it up a little, though.
First, let it run while you're not using the computer.  For those
times when you'll be off the system, use the "Seti@Home" screen saver.
Have the screen saver set to come on after 1 minute, and under
"Settings" have it set to go to blank screen after 0 minutes.  It
processes faster in blank screen mode, and setting it up this way puts
it into blank screen mode after just 1 minute of inactivity.  Also if
it's not an inconvenience, then during those times you're not going to
be on the computer for awhile, unplug any Internet connections you
might have going.  Reboot, shut down all peripheral programs (like
anti-virus & firewall), and that _should_ speed it up a good bit.
Every program you can shut down while Seti@home processes will speed
up its processing time, so long as you leave the "bare bones" programs
running that Windows needs to operate.

Actually you can set the anti-virus program to ignore the Seti
directory so that won't slow it down either.
Also as stated in the other replies, the CLI version of the program
will give a 10 to 20% increase in speed over the screen saver version.
Blank the screen does help if you like the screen saver version but
those pictures still get generated, just in case you want to look at
them, with the CLI version no pictures are generated, so no loss in
cpu time generating them. Seti takes about 384k of ram to run in, so
if you have an L2 cache size of 512k or larger the program will
automatically load totally into memory, speeding up the program ALOT!
If you have a Celeron, Duron or Sempron chip then it/they only have
256k or less of L2 cache and the program has to swap out making it
slower.

Now I've got a 1.3GHz/256 MB RAM and DAG, that makes ALL the
difference.  :-)  It takes an average of 10 hours now, even with extra
programs running.  Anyway, HTH, have a nice day & happy Gregorian New
Year!  :-)

<re-lurk>