I thought I'd start a thread for a stress release from the CUDA and AP business that's going on....

In Task Manager, check how much Memory is being used. In the "Processes" and "Applications" tab, kill as many processes as you can while still having a stable operating system.

I can get Vista Home Premium 32-bit to run happily at 966 MB with SETI still crunching on all cores and 877 MB with BOINC and SETI off.

Windows XP Home Edition SP2 is crunching away using 183MB but without SETI it can go as low as 140MB.

Can you better that?

WARNING> Do not kill any process which looks like it will harm the system if not running (for example: winlogon.exe and explorer.exe) I take no responsibility if you screw things up. Only have a go at it if you know what your doing.

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- Luke.

Ha. 779mb Idle XP64 system. Full running 1400mb. Ha.

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Daniel

771 MB Boinc running both cores 635MB Bonic off

Microsoft Windows Vista
Home Premium x86 Editon, Service Pack 1, Intel(R) Pentium Dual CPU E2180 @ 2.00GHz

418 MB Boinc running gpu and cpu 223MB Boinc off

Microsoft Windows XP
Home x86 Editon, Service Pack 2, AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+

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I seem to recall a while back that Mr. Segur had some Gen1 Pent rigs & "maybe" a 486 DX2 w/ -doze 95'??? Not sure if these can run Enhanced.

Joe? Anything vintage still running that can "lower" the benchmark here? ; > )

WARNING> Do not kill any process which looks like it will harm the system if not running (for example: winlogon.exe and explorer.exe) I take no responsibility if you screw things up. Only have a go at it if you know what your doing.

I am tempted to have a go at it but . . . I definitely fall into the subset of not knowing what I am doing.

:P

Maybe someday I’ll have a go at it on Q-Baby since I have the original XP disk so, if all else fails, I can re-install.

And thanks for the respite from the endless CUDA debate. :o)

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

I'll take you on Luke: my PII running XP SP3 is 144 MB crunching, 112 MB without Boinc running. And I could probably get it lower, but with it's delicate age, I'd rather not risk a crash.

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Eating more cheese on Thursdays.

My main cruncher, a 2x Opteron 2210 rig, is running XP SP2, and typically I run about 30 processes (all the asinine services disabled) and about 500MB of RAM. Turn BOINC on and it's up to about 650MB or RAM. I only reboot once, maybe twice a month. I'm on 18 days right now. So far my peak mem usage record is 2.3gb (defragging an 800gb partition while playing Supreme Commander and crunching in the background). Take a look at the performance tab

As for my entry to this contest..

This is the slimmest I can get 2000 Pro..with all the hardware drivers installed, too..

Keep in mind one of those processes is taskman itself..

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I found that AQUA@home app uses about 1 MB of RAM and 99% CPU on my Linux box with Opteron 1210 and 2 GB RAM.
Tullio

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Actually, explorer.exe is one task you can kill, although you'll lose your taskbar and desktop icons, which is not a big deal if you are running a non-service install and the machine is dedicated to crunching. Win hotkeys won't work either, but you can revive explorer by bringing up Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del), then goto File>Run, and type "explorer.exe", and viola, your icons/taskbar returns!

On Vista, you can free up a noticable amount of memory by disabling Aero and the window "eye-candy" effects, by going to Start Menu, right click Computer, click Properties, click Advanced system settings on the left (brings up UAC), then under Advanced tab, click Settings under Performance box, then under Visual Effects tab click "Adjust for best performance." So many steps! But if you have a lower end GFX card, this definitely makes the Windows GUI much snappier, plus more free memory as mentioned before.

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I couldn't beat that win2000 pro of 47M. The lowest is when I log in: 89M

I think 30M of that is the Nvidia video driver. LOL

I couldn't beat that win2000 pro of 47M. The lowest is when I log in: 89M

I think 30M of that is the Nvidia video driver. LOL

It's all about the setup. The 30mb nVidia driver service is just that.. a service. You don't need it. I always disable it, because it gets rid of an extra process that is essentially useless. I have yet to see any ramification from having it disabled. Not even sure what it's supposed to do, but my games still run just fine, and I can see a picture on the screen, so the drivers still work.. :p

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

I seem to recall a while back that Mr. Segur had some Gen1 Pent rigs & "maybe" a 486 DX2 w/ -doze 95'??? Not sure if these can run Enhanced.

Joe? Anything vintage still running that can "lower" the benchmark here? ; > )

Let's see... No 486 class, but my Win95 Pentium MMX overdrive system would be a competitor. When I moved from S@H Classic to SETI_BOINC it had 80 MB RAM. It stayed that way for a year or so, ran setiathome_enhanced when that was using ~60MB without using any swap, even allowed web browsing, email, etc. without running out of RAM. But it did get into swapping for some other things I occasionally do so I upgraded it to the maximum the motherboard supports; 128 MB. Just checked it now, with a KWSN optimized setiathome_enhanced running there's 52 MB free RAM. There are some utilities and stuff running too, BoincLogX, TClockEx, ClipAid, RtvReco, Netlaunch at least. It's also been up since November 4, there was a long enough power outage that day that I did shut down rather than risk my UPS battery not holding until the power came back.

                                                                 Joe

WinXP SP 3? Total: 2095532 Total: Available: 1618220 With 2 seti WU's in process
WU's take up 33 megs each. IExplorer is 52 megs
Im still running my AVG, and 30 processes.

I got Seti Classic to run on a win98 machine with 256 megs of ram and a 40 meg harddrive ( I was so desperate to run seti at the time). CPU was a p2-300 OC'd to 350 :D

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It was only a few years ago I put XP Pro on my fastest computer.

Compaq Prolinea 5100e
CPU - Pentium 100 (I had it runing at 120MHz)
RAM - On board 8M
RAM - 4 x 36pin Slots Full 48M (2*16+2*8) (Edited after checking)

This machine was still running up until it was replaced by a PIII in 2005, and
I still have this machine in my 'possibly bits useful one day?' pile.

I did it to prove to a friend that MS had 'lied' about XP 'requiring 64M' and that it would instal on any RAM>48M

Surpringly XP ran quite well on this machine, it was a little slow booting, and changing apps (phew - that hdd buzzed), but once it settled it actully outperformed WIN 98 that it replaced due mainly I believe too much smaller mem packet size.

Will I resurrect it to be able to say I have run SETI@Home on it.

NAH!!! Let sleeping dinosaurs lie.

I'm going to guess that it actually has 72pin SIMMs. If they were the older 30pin SIMMs, you'd need 8 matched modules in order to meet the Pentium's 64bit data bus, and if you have mixed size in there, they would never work together. The 72pin SIMMs had a 32bit bus width, so it required them to be installed in pairs to match the Pentium's 64bit data bus. The 30pin SIMMs were only 8bits wide, so a 32bit bus CPU such as the 386 or 486 could handle this in 4s only, whereas the larger 64bit Pentium bus would require 8 to make a full bank of memory.

Ahh! My OOPS

You are correct - 72pin SIMMS

I got confused because there is a pile of 30pin ram just thrown inside the case, and that was what I saw first.

Anyone want some 30 pin? I've got 256K,1M & 4M available.(Go on, add a bit more memory to your cuda cruncher...LOL) OH Sorry, did I just say a bad word?

I seem to recall a while back that Mr. Segur had some Gen1 Pent rigs & "maybe" a 486 DX2 w/ -doze 95'??? Not sure if these can run Enhanced.

Joe? Anything vintage still running that can "lower" the benchmark here? ; > )

.....I upgraded it to the maximum the motherboard supports; 128 MB. Just checked it now, with a KWSN optimized setiathome_enhanced running there's 52 MB free RAM. There are some utilities and stuff running too, BoincLogX, TClockEx, ClipAid, RtvReco, Netlaunch at least.

                                                                 Joe

That's 76MB w/ other processes still running as well.
I think Joe has lowered the limbo bar gents ; > )

Can anyone beat 76MB in a currently running machine??

yes i can if i am going to install winflp on my machine. hopefully in the period between the 1-10 January

I just might be able to..I have my original seti@home comp been running for the past couple of weeks but havent tried installing anything new on it in years.. I only have it up to use a scanner that isnt XP compatible.. perhaps a chore for me to try sometime in the next few days..and hope it doesnt catch fire..lol with my current farm here it was 84F in my office a few minutes ago.. BUT HOPING I might be able to match or beat his scores there

During SETI classic times I was member of a team where we tried to run S@H as slow as possible just for fun, so low-end 586, 486 and even 386 machines were very attractive back then. ;)

I once managed to run Windows 98 SE and S@H classic on a 386SX with only 5 MB RAM and without any FPU, so the floating point unit was pure software emulation!

(For those readers which are younger *g*: up to the later 486DX processor generation, there was no floating point unit included into the CPU. If you needed one, you had to buy it separately for a lot of money and plug it into a special socket on the mainboard, provided your board had one).

It was very difficult to achieve actually, because Win98 refused to be installed on the 386SX, so I had to put the harddisk into a modern pc (which was a Pentium II back then), start installation there and put it back into the 386SX to finish the installation.

The OS was minimized as far as possible, I had to start it in safe mode and had to exchange explorer against the S@H application as windows 'shell' program. But it worked after all. *g*

Of course, the OS and the S@H application did *not* fit into the tiny RAM of only 5 MB. Normally you would expect heavy swapping to the hard disk. But the CPU was so slow, actually, that not much hard disk activity was happening. Even 'doing baseline smoothing' took ages...

If you take a look into my profile at SETI Beta you will find a screenshot of this 'achievement'. ;)

And no... I can *not* retry it with Vista, the 386SX has long been recycled for now. ;)

Regards
Alex

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