My 2 cents worth ,

A regular quad should be able to hands down do those 50 in a few days... Duration Correction Factor could be completely off or something else is stealing cycles big time. If it's one of those Intel duos with HT, then it's understandable that run times are longer

A 10 days caching is asking for trouble with a 10 day deadline, also because the run times are variable. If 1 runs longer than the original estimated, then upon completion it will cause the rest of the cached tasks to inflate, since the client assumes that they will also run longer. The client is in your situation constantly challenged since the projected completion times are dynamically changing and it trying the find ways around to satisfy all deadlines.

You might see improvement in processing if you switch on "Leave application in memory when preempted" if not already on. Initially it will gobble up memory whilst switching tasks, but they wont unload and then reload, loosing some progress each time a preempt is done.

I am really enjoying this rain. In the last week it has rained over a 100 wu's on my computers...... Just let it rain....

@My 2 cents worth, and anyone to whom this is useful

If you want the most out of that laptop you'll need to turn off both CPU throttling and fan throttling in the BIOS, make sure it's running on a cooler pad or something similar and make sure the settings in your profile are for 100% of cores 100% of the time. As for hyperthreading imho it will make each unit run slightly longer but you will get more done overall.

Hmmm... actually a good idea... every new dedicated device is welcome I'd rather stay with towers, since dedicated units run at 100% performance all the time, laptops are getting burning hot. Big towers with some fans come naturally with better cooling. Cleaning from dust or upgrades for memory and GPU's are far more easy on a tower In the end, all depends on what you've paid for your laptop... (which I don't want to know!) For security reasons don't forget to disconnect your battery! Store in a cool place. Keeping it connected will have it charged all the time. Bad for security, bad for battery condition. But usually, refurb laptops come with a bad battery anyway...

The "What's the solution" words here to insert is "ThreadMaster GUI". Very smooth crunching at whatever percent you find is best. Also TThrottle ** for BOINC. Set a temp ceiling and forget about it... for instance set it to 60C and of course set BOINC to auto-pause when on battery. Regrettably, it's not as fine tuning as TMG (you can see it still switching on and off), latter using dynamic stats to manage the amount of cycles allocated to the BOINC processes and then usage near flatlining. Upside,. Throttle auto-adapt to ambient i.e. if put on a laptop cooler, it will automatically start allowing more cycles. Secondary you can set the CPU% in there, to allow some permanent headroom for user operations.

Both work from W2K/XP through W7-64 and Windows server OSses inclusive.

** Has to be started as admin as else the tool wont be able to control the service level science apps.

Edit: Screenshot. TMG is set to permanently limit BOINC to 96% and TThrottle was changed from 75C to 65C. You see pretty rapid decline of temps and it hovering near the target. Note how smooth the TMG control ran and after, the Temp control.