I've had 40 Beta wu's today so far, with my quad getting the majority and as I'm concentrating on HCMD2 at the moment, which has very short wu's, I'm getting a lot of Beta's as well due to the number of connections made and the number of wu's required to fill up my quads cache (0.1 days)

I now have 12 pages of valid beta workunits, 1 page pending, picked up 5 days of runtime last night. All four of my quads are running only betas, the Clean Energy Project is short on workunits so I left CE selected and I set the buffer to five days at all of the rest of my machies (didn't know it was short until I saw all betas when I got home from work and no CE units), the work unit estimate is 4.5 hours, the actual runtime is 1.5 hours so I can run through them very fast and pick up alot of runtime. Only a few have project aborted. The CE units (only about 3 per machine) sit and wait while the others run high priority. Even if they were running they would be paused for high priority betas.

Since the due date is the 23rd of May I imagine the fun is about over and I can switch back the to CE project and a couple others I need to complete. Its also nice to pick up a couple CE units.

There is also a good amount of luck just having the betas available when you connect.

Pausing any project to let only betas run does not work as the software does not seem to pick up any units when it connects if your projects are suspended.

Small buffer, large buffer does not seem to matter except in grabbing a few extras for the queue to keep it going. A small buffer will make the machine search for work more often and then depending on luck you may pick up one. With a large buffer you can pick up 1 to 4 units and have some to spare.

This is the best time as the CE project is giving out units only 1 or 2 per 6 hour period. That way your buffer is not filling up with them and blocking the betas.

It would be nice if we could select ONLY the beta project and not the other ones, but I'm sure its done like that for a reason.

k.t.

That would be weird. Beta is not a project. Beta is for testing new stuff. Also Beta workunits aren't available continuously. They come it bursts, so there could be weeks or even months without a single workunits outthere.

Also beta batches typically come out in small batches (few hunderd, few thousand), and for proper testing would require a wide spread of systems all doing their bit, not 100 workunits in the queue of one machine that has Beta only checked...

I'd like to get my beta badge like anyone else, and yes, if there is a new batch of beta's outthere I'd like to dig in too but, for me at least, I'm not here for the badge hunting, although it does add a funfactor, but primarily for the good things that hopefully come out of this research.

I had LOTS of Betas on a Windows 2008 64bit server recently.

On some of my other systems, I get a few now and again, but not many.
So I'm guessing that if you have some sort of odd system, you are more likely to get Beta Work units.

However, after the system got through about 10 or 20 units I decided I would Click on UPDATE. Sure enough the system sent the finished workunits in, but straight after this, the WCG Aborted lots of Beta units!

You have made a couple of deadly mistakes in your suggested method.
1. If you change your buffer to 8 days, you are not guaranteed to get 8 days of Beta. You might get only 1 Beta job and 7.9 days of other tasks. When you abort those tasks, you negatively affect the reliability rating of that machine for many days. Plus you place extra load on the scheduler who then has to resend the jobs you aborted to other crunchers.
2. When you decrease your buffer back to .1 days, you prevent your computer from asking for more work. This prevents your system from acknowledging the completed WU and may cause your WU to be marked as Too Late.

Like everything involved in WCG you need to have patience and you need to go gently whenever you change settings. Massive changes as suggested above are not the solution. I do not know everything about managing this project but I do have 62 days of Beta WU, so I have had some success.