I downloaded the correct version for my Mac OSX Tiger, but the stats for my computer are wrong!

I have been connotated with a computer I have never heard of, it is not my OS etc.

My Computer is an iBook G4, not a Powerbook 5,6 (or whatever it says)
my CPU speed is faster than I have been credit for blah, blah.

I can't even see any Mac OS's on the lists of members!

What is going on?

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Organic Chemist in Training @ UMIST
1st Year Undergraduate
)>;D

It appears you actually don't have a problem. The PowerBook 6,5 listed for you is what BOINC calls an iBook G4. My iBook G4, 1.33 GHz, is listed as PowerBook 6,5 also. I haven't found a translation table yet for interpreting between what BOINC calls a Mac and what Apple calls a Mac, but there is probably one out there somewhere. If you pull down the blue apple, select "about this mac", then click on more info, then on the Software triangle, you'll see your OS is listed as Mac OS X 10.4.2 and it will also say Kernel Version: Darwin 8.2.0.

It also looks as if your iBook is running a bit slow. Go to your System Preferences, select Energy Saver, click on the Options tab, then look down near the bottom of the window for a pulldown called "processor performance". My G4 PowerBook here at work has two settings: "highest" and "reduced". If yours is set to "reduced" or equivalent in Tiger, your laptop processor is slowed down so to conserve energy and reduce heating. I have had my PowerBook set on "highest" for over 2 years, and my iBook for almost 4 months. The fan stays on all the time on the PowerBook, but cycles on and off in the iBook. To help reduce heat buildup in the processor and memory, I have elevated my Macs off the table on a couple of sticks to allow air circulation underneath the machine. This helps greatly. I've seen reports from others on the forum that they've had success using wire cake cooling racks and so forth. Changing your processor setting from "reduce" to "highest" will probably increase its speed by 30-40%, which means you'll be able to process 30-40% more SETI Work Units.

Another thing you can do to increase your performance is to go to Team MacNN web site and download the latest superoptimized BOINC client (4.44 G4 SuperBench) and install it. You can also then scroll down to the bottom of the page and download and install the Altivec optimized SETI client, (G4 7450 version) which may also help. To install the BOINC 4.44, download it. Quit the BOINC application. Go to your Applications folder and Control-Click once on the application (either BOINC Manager or MenuBar). Select "show package contents". Open the folder, then open one of the inside folders until you find one with a file called simply "boinc". Remove the "boinc" file, and replace it with the one you downloaded from Team MacNN, then rename the long name to "boinc" making sure it's exactly like the other one you removed. Close everything and restart BOINC Manager or MenuBar. Any SETI work unit in progress should resume right where it left off.

To install the SETI optimized client G4 7450, go to you account page on the SETI web site and set your "connect to" to .01 days (roughly fifteen minutes). This will reduce your WU queue so you don't waste work units, as installing the new SETI client will get rid of any "old" units in queue. After your queue goes down, and right after a WU completes and is uploaded, go to the menu for your BOINC application and click the Update button to tell SETI your really done with the last WU uploaded. Then Quit the applicaition. Find the location of the SETI folder - probably in Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Boinc Data/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu. Open this and remove the setiathome file. Replace it with the "setiathome_4.3_ppcG4.7450.altivec" file you downloaded from Team MacNN. Also, make sure you put the file "app_info.xml" into the same folder as the "setiathome_4.3_ppcG4.7450.altivec" because the app_info file tells BOINC Manager or MenuBar that you want to use the optimized client. Close everything up and restart the application. Your messages will report something like "2005-08-09 15:42:44 [SETI@home] Found app_info.xml; using anonymous platform" and will re-run the benchmarks, and this is good.

One word of caution. The 4.44 BOINC is Beta software and there are a couple of known bugs that the developers are aware of and working on. One of these is that SETI and Einstein@home don't play well together in BOINC. If you are running SETI by itself, or with CPDN, everything seems to work fine. If you run Einstein by itself, it seems to work pretty well. If you mix SETI and Einstein, though, your machine will likely hang and need to quit BOINC and restart it, one or more times per day.

And, finally, if any or all of this helps, please consider joining Team MacNN.

C

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