Pardon me for asking a few things about Seti and Boinc that might seen rather basic.  I just processed my 1000th WU on Setiathome 3.08 and thought I would test drive Boinc to see what would be required to update my system to handle it.

Computer wise I am living in the stone age.  I run Seti on 3 computers, 2 PIII 600 MHz machines that don't have modems and are supplied by a floppy drive network and one K6-500MHz which has a dial up 56K modem. The P3s I run 24/7 and the K6 I turn on and off as required (it takes 40 hours to process a WU so I save power when I can). All machines run Win98 as I find it processes faster than XP (13 hours average compared to 15) I download 10 WU onto my AMD machine, take a couple of days to process them then submit the results.  Submitting involves copying the result.sah file onto the K6 seti directory and using Seti 3.08 to upload the WUs one at a time. A labour intensive process even with controlling bat files.  I log onto the Internet for 15mins every few days to do this.  It may not be the most glamorous setup but it processes 4 WU a day with expendable machinery.

I tried looking for a Boinc help file but I can't bring it up.  When I downloaded Boinc it downloaded Setiathome 4.18 and a WU which seemed to be dependent on the K6 specs. I wondered if and how that WU would perform if copied to a different computer.  I let Bionic go for about an hour while I was logged off the Internet.  It kept wanting access but that didn't seem to be stopping it from running.  Then I turned it off and went to bed.  When I restarted Boinc today it wanted access to the Internet again. This time however there was no running of a unit.

What I am wondering is, is there anyway Boinc will run with a dial up connection only connecting every few days?  Or will I have to go to Broadband or dial on demand in order to carry on running Seti?  Can I still turn machines off without bringing a WU to a grinding halt?  And is Boinc still amenable to transfer by floppy disk?  Or am I going to have to invest in a wireless network.

I'd just like to know what I'm getting myself into ... that's all.

Thanks