I work in an administrative job for the Ministry of Defence using computers unfortunately. Previous jobs in the MoD have had me juggling data between three machines. So I consider the weird assortment I've got bolted onto my current machine as fairly tame. After all I only have to worry about one machine. It also has the advantage that the local IT department hate me as they know they can't win with the standard cry of 'Well you can do your job from any machine.'. As I can't I end up getting express treatment to make certain I can carry on working. Which is why I'm not popular with them. At home I have a laptop because my family live a couple of hundred miles away and I would hate to have to carry a desktop system all that way. You could consider me fairly seasoned as a laptop user as I avoid the major mistake of newbies by not using a laptop case to transport it. Not only do I avoid theft, but the arm ache as well.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
I got into running Seti@home because a friend had it on his computer. Unfortunately my machine a 500Mhz laptop had problems running the software and I ended up having to disable it. Recently after a bad crash on my old laptop I replaced it with an 800Mhz laptop. The new machine has in its first month bought my total to 17 runs from the two or three that I was able to run on my old machine. The software runs quite happily in the background and has free reign of the machine while I'm asleep.
While there have been minor problems requiring replacing the software twice there hasn't been any difficulties that couldn't be overcome. I'm hoping to see an increase in the speed of processing when I upgrade the memory later this month.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
