On Fri, 19 May 2006 12:16:39 -0700, geothermal
<jj206@remoooooovethisdrizzle.com> wrote:

Big Bob Smith wrote:

Howdy All

I've run into a bit of a puzzler when running BOINC on one of my home
PCs. The problem/symptons as follows - hope someone has seen something
like this before and has a solution.

This PC is a 2G Pentium 4 with 2G of RAM....it has been running Seti
and BOINC for over 3 years without incident. In the last 3 months when
running BOINC ..the BOINC process shoots up to the "normal" 97-99% of
CPU useage and stays there ..for about 2 minutes. At about 2 minutes
in the "System" process in Task Manager starts up (it normally is 2%
or less) and runs steadily @ 50% of CPU - but only while BOINC is
running.........shut off BOINC and it drops back to under 2%.....

Nothing new in the way of programs have been installed.......

Do you have any programs that automatically update themselves ?

Only thing that does auto-updates is the Symantec
Anti-Virus........once a week in the middle of the night....nothing
else .

to cause
this to occur. Monitoring the processes shows System (SMSS - CSRSS -
Winlogon) as fairly tame and benign stuff......DPC (Deffered Procedure
Calls) also runs atabout 20% when this happens................so this
leaves BOINC about 15-20% CPU at best and with the new 5.12 processing
this makes a WU go from the old 3h30m to 11h45m..........not good

Also this is 1 of 5 PCs I have at home running BOINC.......none of the
others show anything like this......

Uninstalled and reinstalled BOINC (new v 5.4.9) - no improvement
Shut off Antivirus (Symantec) - no effect
Turned off firewall - no effect


If anyone has any ideas I'd sure entertain them............and maybe
wine and dine them too ;).

Big Bob Smith

Well, whenever I get freaky behavior, or if I am in the UK at the time
then it is behaviour, I think....*smile*  What I do is run a registry
cleaner program to spiffy things up a bit.  Clean the cache and temp 
files and all that as well.  Tune up as they say at the auto shop.
I like regcleaner.exe to use on my win xp boxes.

Pretty sure the registry is fairly clean.........I dont add alot of
software on this box...........need it to dial in to work so it stays
fairly devoid of new installs......

The other thing I try just for the heck of it, is to run defrag in 
safe mode.  Very rarely does it clear some odd flutter in the computer.

Got and use Diskeeper on a once a week basis......like to keep things
nice and neat :]

The last thing to check is to call your ISP and see if they changed 
something 3 months ago on your account or something in general.  I am 
suspecting that my ISP does a lot of maintenance between 2am and 4am 
and my BOINC does not like some of the things they are doing, so I 
have shut off BOINC between those hours of the night, and I have 
notice less error boxes popping up since doing that.

Thats a thought..........but dont think that the local crew has a clue
what is going on.....

cheers,
Jonathan