Quietly we read <UR4Ue.8877$uD6.6040@tornado.ohiordc.rr.com>, unable to contain our credulity we realized that Eric <nospam@no.nospam.not> said this:

"Bill Jillians"  wrote in message

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)

Hi,

I started a previous thread, ("What the hell is up with Boinc?"), regarding
older computers and Boinc performance.

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sci.seti/browse_thread/thread/c4552eb
ed4e3b28e/5379c8e7d3ead36b#5379c8e7d3ead36b

I have a few computers here that are very similiar to the ones you
described, spec-wise.   Only difference I can see is that I have broadband
(cable) and a WLAN going on..  These computers aren't my main "working
computers", but are used as "file servers".  Basically, they are just dumb
data dumpsters.  (Perfect homes for SETI, one would think.) All are 450 Mhz
and 500 Mhz P3's, 512MB RAM, Win98, ect. HDD's in all are SCSI-U2W.  The
largest of the towers has a m/b that supports two processors and has RAID
capapability with it's onboard SCSI -- so, one of these days, I plan on
consolidating all the HDD's into that tower, get the RAID thing going on,
pick up another processor, and get an OS up and running to take advantage of
duals.   I'm going to pick up a NAS first though, so will have plenty of
space to "juggle with" before swapping stuff around.

Anyway... My experience with Boinc on these has not been very good.  I would
just stick to SETI Classic until it is completely shut down.

My main problems with Boinc on them are all "known issues" with older PC's
and Win98:

- Boinc causes explorer.exe (shell) to hang about once every week or two.
Explorer will automatically restart, but all the network protocols get
fungled afterwards requiring a physical reboot to get them talking again.
This is very annoying as all these towers are running (hidden) inside a
closet with no monitor/keyboard attached.  They are streamlined to a mininum
and kept clean against malware.  The only applications, besides Boinc, that
are running is just UltraVNC (freeware remote desktop) and LCDC (program to
send displays to LCD screens), and of course the network protocols.  Without
Boinc running, they run forever.  With it, they are lucky to make it two
weeks.

- The damn screensaver "password protected" un-feature.  Not really a big
deal since these towers aren't using monitors anymore, but still annoying.
This is another "known issue" that they have been promising to fix "in the
next version" -- for the last 3+ years.  With certain graphic chipsets (ATI,
UltraTNT), and Win98, if you have "password protected" enabled for the Boinc
screensaver then once the screensaver activates you won't be able to get
back to your desktop.  The screensaver runs just fine, but when the password
dialogue box appears it put's the mouse focus BEHIND the box -- so you can't
ever type your password into the box!  You have to power cycle.  It is a
"known issue" and has nothing to do with any settings or options -- nor is
it possible to focus into the box by alt-tab'ing or anything like that
either.  Boinc's response to this "known issue" has been, for years, to
"just use another another screensaver" if you want to use a secure
screensaver.  I guess one of Boinc's objectives was to have the only
screensaver that does not allow the use of passwords.  Many people report
the same annoyance with WinXP ("password on resume") as well. (Yes, I know
it works correctly for some but for many it does not.  If it does for you,
thats great.)

- Boinc is buggy and bloated (on older PC's with Win98).  Even if explorer
doesn't hang, Boinc starts running pretty bad after about a week anyway.
SETI Classic runs beautifully on these PC's.  Is Boinc and Seti Classic, at
the core, doing the same number crunching algorithms to find ET?  If so, why
can't Boinc be as efficient as Classic?

(Yes, all these PC's are kept current with Bill's updates, behind firewalls,
scanned regularly for viruses and spyware, defragged periodically, ect.)

I'd just stick with Classic.  "If its not broken, don't fix it."   As for
automatic dialups with Boinc, I'm not sure as I have broadband, but as buggy
as Boinc is I doubt it would be smart enough to wait for a modem to dialup
before attempting traffic.  Probably could do some sort of dialup proxy, but
be a PITA and not worth the trouble.

Cheers,
Eric
(who misses the good 'ol SETI that was transparant and required no
babysitting.)

Hello Eric, thanks for the comprehensive reply.  I have Boinc up and running now with a cache of WUs  on each machine.  I came home yesterday and one which ran for ever on Seti classic had crashed so I suppose that was the explorer crash you mentioned above.  Another headache I experience is WUs that run for several hours and then restart. Seems like a waste of resources and I wonder if anyone knows why that happends.
I have no idea how this scoring system works.  I have now submitted about 6 WUs but my total score is 190 and my average score is 10 or so. What do these numbers mean?  Also the Statistics tab doesn't exactly produce detailed information, just a graph with (at present) two points on it.  What is this supposed to tell me?
Presumably there will soon be an updated version of Boinc just like seti classic addressed bugs with new versions when it first came out.  Also it encourages you to join other projects when seti is having an outage - projects which do not have the same appeal or subscribers as seti but may be producing just as significant results (I note the climate change model that was mentioned in the paper a few months back).
Now I've got it running I'll stick with it to see if things improve.  It certainly isn't as high maintenance as my old floppy network was ... plus the overhead of waiting several minutes for a WU to finish before changing it are now gone. It would help if when a WU finishes processing the next one could start automatically but it seems some regular checking is required to keep the system working.
Cheers
Bill