Boinc/seti@home KILLS my Win7 computer - makes it useless!

Hi,

I am unhappy. Very. Here's the story ... if anybody is listening.

I installed the latest boinc/seti@home just 3 or 4 days ago. My computer is
Win7-32 bit with 4gb of memory with all of the latest updates. I run with a
minimum number of started tasks.

I immediately started seeing a significant slow down of my computer - for
all tasks. And that was with nothing else running. It was so bad that even
the mouse would not track correctly. And 'suspending' BOINC did not help.

I uninstalled BOINC - and everything went back to normal ... except my
screen saver was not working (disabled). I redid the screen saver and
my computer appears to be "back to normal".

If memory serves me correctly I had the same problem the last time I tried
seti@home/boinc ... which was probably 3 or so years ago.

It would appear that boinc was using my CPU - heavily - all the time and
was not running "only when I'm not using the computer". I looked at the
BOINC settings and could not find any clues.

I will NOT be re-installing without a clear set of procedures that makes
seti@home do "as advertised". That's the whole purpose of this thing!

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Using BOINC advanced view, go to Tools/computing preferences/processor usage. There are several usage options you can set there to accomplish your aims.
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On default preferences, BOINC will not use your CPU or GPU unless the computer is idle. However, there's a caveat in that it needs a program to detect idleness on Windows Vista, 7 and 8, called boinctray.exe

This program is not started immediately upon installation of BOINC, rather only after a reboot of the computer. That's normally fixed when the user installs BOINC for the first time, to finalize the making of the user groups and accounts. If you had it on your system before, there was no need to restart, thus the idle tracking program isn't started.

So reinstall BOINC and when it starts make sure that boinctray.exe is started. Check that in Windows Task Manager. If it isn't, start it from the BOINC programs directory, normally on 32bit Windows in C:\Program Files\BOINC\

When you start it (double-clicking on it will do that), you won't see any confirmation that it started, other than by checking in Windows Task Manager.

A bit of advice, since you only have one computer, use the local preferences. These take immediately when you change them, you don't have to wait for BOINC to contact the project first. When you do, set up the local Advanced Preferences that the CPU and GPU are only used when the computer is idle. This means checking While computer is in use and Use GPU while computer is in use on

Clicking Ok will save the changes and BOINC will use them immediately.

But do check the running of BOINCTray.exe first.
____________
Jord

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