On Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:35:19 GMT, BrianW <brian@nospam.net> wrote:

SciFi wrote:

"Jason H." <exosearch@juno.com> wrote in message 
news:1164811252.168749.318730@j72g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Straining Earthlings' Terrestrial Intelligence (24 Nov.'06)

http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2006/11/straining_earth.html

Points out issues with BOINC, its makers and its forums.

Regards, Jason

Well it looks like I'm not the only one who dropped out because of that 
BOINC piece of crap! I was proud to have participated in this project for 
over 7 years & even recruited others to join but no more. SETI admins, just 
how many users have you lost since the change? This "improved system" lasted 
only about a week with me. The program bogged down pc performance, refused 
to stop when screensaver disengaged, & was constantly in the way & in my 
face every time I needed to use the computer! This "improvement" ranks right 
up there with NEW COKE....how did that one go again ,oh yea alienate your 
loyal fans & turn them in to vocal opponents, loose market share, then 
relies your mistake, switch back to the original as quickly & quietly as 
possible,& FIRE THE MORON that came up with the idea in the first place! 
Wait a minute....you guys didn't hire that same idiot to "improve" SETI did 
you??? Since you do have the first part of this strategy down pat maybe you 
look into the last part.

Your Discussed Former Member,
SciFi
7+ years
56,870 hours CPU time
2650 work units

I'm sorry to hear that you - and apparently some others - have had 
problems with BOINC so severe that you felt obliged to ditch it.

I switched to BOINC shortly after it started, and have run both Seti and 
CPDN successfully on several PCs with none of the problems you refer to. 
OK there have been various outages, notably at Berkeley, and some of the 
earlier BOINC versions were rather flaky, but the most recent versions 
of the BOINC software has been stable, and have caused me no problems 
whatsoever. I suspect that at least some of your problems were because 
the software wasn't configured properly in the first place. In 
particular, I have never found that BOINC continued to hog CPU resources 
when I was doing other work, or caused any of my PCs to overheat. (An 
"idle" PC isn't idle anyway, it's repeatedly executing an "idle loop".) 
However it _is_ designed to continue to use spare processing capacity at 
all times, and not just when in screen saver mode. (And it is generally 
recommended that the BOINC screensaver should not be used in any case.)

I have always found the help forums to be just that, helpful - on the 
relatively few occasions when I have found it necessary to use them.

Remember that BOINC isn't just a "new and improved" Seti, it's a 
distributed framework used by several other projects as well. Ever heard 
of Einstein, Rosetta, World Community Grid, ...?

Far from *disgusted* continuing member.
178269 Seti BOINC credits and counting
170966 CPDN credits and counting

From another "far from disgusted user":
Total credit: 2,575,030.21 Seti results and counting
I have 22 pc's running Boinc and run Seti only. It works find on my
pc's. I have Windows only and use OS's from Me, to 2000, to XP home
and pro, and Vista. Boinc runs fine for me on all of them. Most are
Boinc only pc's, so I do not have issues wit hthe pc not stopping
while do something else. But it is on this pc I am writing this on, my
main pc. It is running 4 units at one time, yes I have a dual core
with HT on each core so Windows thinks I have 4 cpus. It works fine,
no slowdowns, no hangups, no problems.