SPCR

1) I had horrible experience with seti 3-4 years back. (system corruption) Not to mention I still haven't seen alien yet (or heard of).

2) Prime 95 sounds interesting but I lost interest in mathematics... ever since kindergarden. (Hah! And I am a developer and project manager )

3) Unlike above 2, folding is not as agressive. It won't slow you down while you are web browsing, watching DVD, etc (granted you have over 2Ghz of CPU). In fact, its very good at handing back the resources to whatever demands it. I can run 3dmark and maybe see 2-4 percent difference if I left folding on.

4) This actually affects us in beneficial (or controversial depending on how data will be used) manner in relatively short time. (we are talking maybe few years down the road to have major breakthrough in medicine with our help)

5) Its great to test how system stability is after building one. (Even better than prime 95... I run 3dmark & games on with folding on to really stress my new builds of machines... it gets temp higher than any single method as it will stress both GPU & CPU near to its limit).

The SETI@home client is much improved in the last four years. Problems that I have encountered with the Folding@home clients such as inability to return from screensaver mode, loss of GL rendering context, and system lockup I have not found in the SETI@home client.

For now, I do not recommend using the graphical Folding@home clients, use the console instead (its also much faster)

herosformula wrote:The SETI@home client is much improved in the last four years. Problems that I have encountered with the Folding@home clients such as inability to return from screensaver mode, loss of GL rendering context, and system lockup I have not found in the SETI@home client.

For now, I do not recommend using the graphical Folding@home clients, use the console instead (its also much faster)

Screen saver? No sir... I use the background processing one. Screen savers never do work quite correctly IMHO. Since I sit on the machine at least 5-6 hours a day (sometimes close to 15 hours or so, I just turn it off before I go to sleep etc).

let's see here:

folding: trying to figure out how our own bodies tick.

seti: looking for aliens so they can diss us coz we dont know how our own bodies tick

prime 95: no comment. it killed my p166.

so basically, i say go with life sciences, and after we've figured out everything. then we can go and bother the little green men.

The SETI@home client is integrated, allowing you to set background processing even when the screensaver is not active.

As to what types of science you wish to devote your computing resources to, that is an individual choice. You never know what good or bad will be the result of your efforts.