Squibbly wrote:

what is this BOINC thingy i keep seeing
and what advantages does it have to have it install with SETI3.08??

this is the next version of seti@home.  it's open source, and other distributed computing projects are using it, so you can sign up for them too, or just sign up with seti.  It manually updates the seti part of the program so you don't have to install a new program every time they come out with a newer version, and seti3.08 (classic) will soon be supported no longer!
I plan to stick it out with classic, until they stop creating work units for it, but that's just my opinion!