h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I posted this to the SETI@home page on hootoo but then found more on this page.. pardon the spamming on both but hopefully I'll get an answer faster...


I posted this on the SETI site but never got a response... I stopped using SETI@home because whenever it loaded it shot my CPU usage up to 100% and kept it there, even when the screensaver was off... I'd love to continue using it and helping but obviously it's not going to happen if it hogs my CPU. Any thoughts?

TIA

Do you have your preferences set up to "Data analysis runs only when the screen saver is active or application window is maximized"? It's located under Settings: Preferences

I did yes... I've removed the program since then because of the problems... I even tried selecting that it run constantly since the SETI site said it only used about 16% of resources to see if running constantly would keep it at a steady 16% instead of jumping to 100% then not releasing the resources when disabled...

It's sad because I really liked the idea of participating..

I read on one of my computer mail lists that if you download and run SETI directly from the terminal (entirely bypassing the graphical portion), it'll whip through it a heck of a lot faster. Dunno ...

I'm considering setting up another tower anyway. I have an old 'puter in the attic and I may network them. If I do that I'll run SETI@home on it because it won't be doing much else.

Dr St J told me of a similar program for cancer research. I dloaded it today and it's working with no problems. Since my dad died of cancer I think I'll keep that one unless it starts to act up on me.

Probably more likely to find a cure for cancer than aliens anyway ... they're too smart to let us detect them.

I think the only chance we have of finding extraterrestrials is if they find us...

Quite frankly, if I found us, I'd sneak quietly away, and keep going!

now why would you say a thing like that??

Because I *have* found us, and I'm a bit scared.

Seti@home uses all avalible cpu power as it runs. So as long as it's running the cpu usage will stay at 100%.
If u start up another program, seti will use all the power that is not used by any other porgram running.
Hope this cleared up some of the confusion.

You're just scared because of the woman Shea..

Actually Klatti it wouldn't relinquish any power back to the system so it would slow down my system and even make it catch on occasion. Even in 'screensaver' mode where it's supposed to only run when I'm not using the puter it would refuse to let go. I'd have to go into the task manager and manually remove the process. The memory leak was just a headache to deal with. It could be because the program was designed for older OSs and hasn't yet been upgraded for XP. I don't know.

Have u looked here?:
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/windows.html

Hopefully u find the answer to your problem.

Thanks I'll check it out. At this point I'm running another similar program for cancer research on this puter and it's not causing the memory link. I plan on networking this one with an old puter I have in the attic as soon as I buy a NIC for it. When I do that I may run the SETI@home program on that puter since at some point it's just going to be a print server.

Thanks again.

I looked at the page, Klatti. The first doesn't apply as it's a new system with XP and not an upgraded system. I had uninstalled and reinstalled anyway to see if that would help when it was happening though.

The second doesn't apply because that was something I had thought of and had disabled screensavers before running the reinstalled version. It seems that something still causes the memory leak.

Okay... now I finally have Seti@home running. On my laptop... I networked it and loaded the program on it... it can pretty much run nonstop because I seldom use the thing these days... So now one puter is working to cure cancer while the other is out in space somewhere...

You're a Rennaissance woman, Batty.

renaissance maybe...