Oh yes !

i have tried with many people to get more people to run WCG and or boinc and i have have very limited sucesses... most people tell me that it slows down there system too much or they dont want there computer geting that hot... or my most recent ones are with the fact that over the years i have lost/killed 4 of my computers (that happened to be running boinc along with lots of other things and were also OLD) but people see that and think see your killing you computer with it not that the system that died couldnt even handle xp (that old)

personaly i will talk it up and if i get 1 person a year to donate 1 computer towards Boinc or WCG or any distributed computing program i am happy..

i also know of one person who stoped running boinc recently (a friend) whos reason was the cost of power to run a computer 24/7 at 100%...

good luck recurting personaly i try to attach the signature i use when posting forums to e-mails when i get a chance to

The biggest drawback is what i call the uncertainty. I had a 2.4 C2D system running WCG for 4 months with no problem. All of a sudden the user said they started to notice a slowdown and deleted BOINC. I said ok and told the user I left it off. I did go back in and reinstall BOINC and set it to 80% CPU and 70% memory. Within 2 hours the user came to me and asked that BOINC be removed, which I did.

a C2D at 80% and the user immediately recognizes it working, and on a machine that is only used for some web surfing? Forever a mystery.

astrolab,
For a stealth Boinc (i.e. silent) I would recommend setting the CPU at 50 %, otherwise the fan will "pump", 4 seconds noisy with a short break because of the one second of inactivity. On a noisy machine it is probably even more nerve breaking than a fan always running at full speed!

After long periods of inactivity (e.g. longer breaks at the cafeteria) already started user programs may also take a bit longer to come back to life, I mean to be brought back from the swap file, particularly if this machine has not much RAM.

Last point, if your end user is convinced that Boinc is detrimental to his high efficiency and if he is not too ignorant about PCs his first step when you give him the machine back is probably to open Task Manager and see if you have installed it again...

Good luck! Jean.

Edit: Replaced "i.e. longer breaks at the cafeteria" with "e.g. longer breaks at the cafeteria".

JP,
Thanks for the link to your E-Mail SIG.
Is it OK to modify it a bit ? as not all know about MIT over here, and there's a broken link
Maybe it's too long for some emails but it gets the message over.

I'll post it here for comments or improvements.

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Have you ever thought:
What if all the unused computing power of the world's estimated 1 billion PCs. as well as Macs and servers, could be linked to benefit humanity.

Since 2004 the World Community Grid has amassed >250,000 years of work donated by nearly half a million members.

(YES, Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand 24/7/365 typical home computer years so far !!) and is adding circa 250 years more every day, working to find cures for Cancer, Flu, Muscular Dystrophy and more, it's started to make that dream into a reality but desperately needs more people to join in with the fight. Only your unused computational power is used, without interfering with your computer needs.

Grid computing joins together many individual computers, creating one large system with massive computational power. Because the work is split into small pieces that can be processed simultaneously research time is reduced from many years to months, or even days.

info: The Research page describes WCG’s current projects.
info: Massive donation from the Clemson University turning idle computer time into solutions for world problems.
info: Read about The World Community Grid on WIKIPEDIA

You don't have to be a mad scientist with crazy hair and thick glasses to donate your spare CPU's (although it's allowed) just install this app and watch it crunch your most hated diseases.
P.S. Please pass the message on, we need the world to know !!