The screensaver feature that blanks out the screen (suppressing the pretty pictures) only works if you put in a NONZERO value for the "go to blank screen" minutes number. The classic SAH client allowed you to put in zero and it would then always go straight to blank. In other words, you'd never see the graphics and it would go straight to blank screen number crunching. As it stands now, I have to put in a non-zero number (like 1), resulting in at least 1 minute of graphics display when the screensaver kicks in before it blanks out.

Without the desired zero-minutes behavior, I can't run this on my many computers at work. I don't need to be explaining to every yahoo that wanders by what the pictures on the computer mean. So, this is a showstopper for me. I've been crunching SETI since May 12h, 1999, and am in the 99th percentile of completed WUs, but this has brought me to a dead stop.

If you agree that this is an important feature to add (actually, bug to fix), please go here:

http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=4409

and click on the "I have this question too" button, so maybe it will rise to the top of that wishlist stack and get fixed soon. Seems simple ...

If you don't want the graphics, then just run the client version.

Or run the default/blank screensaver.

> Or run the default/blank screensaver.


That is what I just thought and wanted to post when I read the first post of this thread =)

> Or run the default/blank screensaver.

Now, see, I thought something weird was going on. After I posted, I noticed that when the blank screensaver (windows basic blank SS) kicked in, it was indeed going up to 100% CPU. So if I have the BOINC client configured to not work while I'm active, does it then detect when another screensaver has kicked in? I do not have the BOINC screensaver selected because of the graphics issue.

This needs to be documented better, and I still think the original post describes a bug :) There's a separate checkbox to control whether you want it to blank at all, so I don't buy the "0=disabled" argument ...