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

Seti@Home is the first and biggest Distributed Computing program on the Internet.

The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence@Home is a Privately funded research project operating at the University of Berkely in California. It uses the Arecibo array in South America.

If you require a more user friendly idea of what is going on, the first 20 minutes of the film "Contact" starring Jodi Foster is instructive.

I have been crunching Seti units for 18 months. I have 509 at present.
There are those who use PCs dedicated to nothing else and have very impressive results. I am more the quiet guy in the background. At 509, I have done more units than 93% of over 4 million users. But it is not about results returned. It is about taking part.

My PC runs 18 hours a day Crunching. It is doing something useful, not P2P swapping.

May I strongly suggest that you run Seti@Home. You don't get paid, and there is a certain "Nerd" element; but ultimately, it is rewarding.

It's not about results returned? You must not have seen some of the friendly competition among the members of our team!

My PC runs Seti in the background.

I do not run a string of networked PCs just to get my name in lights.

I think that 500 is a fair enough amount for a Multi Use PC. After all, I have not been doing it for long.