Bill Jillians wrote:

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

Unofficial Boinc documentaion site.
http://boinc-doc.net/boinc-wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
See, "The BOINC System", for most documents, about the third underlined item
down on the main page.