No, you just need to learn the secrets of SETI@Home fanaticism.
First of all, what Version are you using? The Win95/98 screen saver? Set it to blank the screen after 0 minutes. No, not your screen saver timeout in the Windows settings. The blank screen setting in the actual SETI program. The pretty graphics use as much CPU as the actual calculations. By turning them off you'll save a lot of power. You'll probably more than double the speed at which you finish a work unit just by doing that. A 1 Ghz P III is actually fairly powerful. You could check the box to have it running all the time in the background, I think. I have an 800 Mhz Duron and it's no problem for me to have it running all the time.
Now after that you have to consider how you have configured your computer and what else is running on it. Sounds are cute, but use MUCH CPU time playing unless you've got a fancy sound subsystem with hardware buffering. It would be wise to turn sounds off. Lots of 'harmless' programs that load up and sit in memory waiting for you to do something are actually using a noticable portion of your CPU power. What have you got in your task bar? Think real hard about whether you need those things. Is it really that hard to just go to the menu or desktop icon to activate that program? Remove as many as possible.
There are some more obscure tweaks that will give you a tiny percentage more, like using lower color depth on your screen. But the best improvement will come from not using the screen saver Version at all. Get the Win NT Version, which DOES run in Win95/98, and use that instead. (Then color depth doesn't matter!) It's about 10 percent faster than the Screensaver even with the graphics turned off. I think you will find that everyone on the SE IV group has been using the NT Version for a long time now.
I suppose I should rejoin the group but I hate the competitiveness of it. It's supposed to be 'fun' and/or 'charity' in that you're donating
spare computer power to a good non-profit cause, but it's become a huge competitve thing for so many people now. There are entire farms of computers in some people's basements dedicated to SETI and nothing else. Some 'gift of spare CPU time'...
But at least they've got the largest accumulated computing project in history now. Just wait till SETI@HOME II starts up for the southern hemisphere...
[ September 29, 2002, 01:50: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]
Re: OT: Space Empires and Seti@Home
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