Good Afternoon, Doctor (Bonneau?),

Even though I have a research project of my own that I would like to propose but only if it were vaster larger than it is right now, I do have something I need to bring to your attention.

Perhaps, I am muddying the waters here but I don’t think so.

My local general guru for computers—this is his fulltime vocation with a major office supply chain and he has a degree in computer science—nearly flipped his gourd when I told me I was involved in a computer-grid, for he knows that I treat my computer with exceptionally loving care.

In short, he was very much against my participation—especially when I mentioned 24/7 running.

“Why donate the life of your computer to them?” he responded. “Computers today are very fragile because of our pushing chip-technology to the wall. Heat in the chips is a big issue but also, there are only a certain number of hours of running time engineered into your power supply.

“It used to be the geeky and completely correct thing to leave your computer on 24/7, but not anymore. They’ve solved the internal surge issues that the geeks were avoiding by not turning their computers on and off. But now, you run the risk of fluctuating current as well as surges from outside your computer because of how fragile they’ve become. That wasn’t a particular issue 10 years ago. It is now.”

I told him I not only had top-quality surge protection built into a battery-backup unit I use as my power protection but that I am inside a LAN with all its own surge and power protection.

“Is your battery-backup AVR-rated?” he asked and I told him it was. (AVR: Automatic Voltage Regulation)

He was satisfied with that and then returned to my “donating” my computer to the grid-owners and their project from the perspective of the number of hours engineered into my power supply unit and that I was still definitely degrading my motherboard as well as the CPU, itself, by running 24/7.

“What about this throttle they now have?” I asked.

“It slows everything down, including your own projects’ response times, doesn’t it?” he asked, and I admitted that was what is stated in the forums.

“You can’t give them a free ride, Jim,” he said. “They are costing you a part of the life of your computer no matter how you look at it.”

Being a journalist by nature, I double-checked the guru’s statements and he is correct all the way. Computers are more fragile today. They should not be left on 24/7 as in the “old days”. They are very heat-sensitive. And the weak link for PCs today is the power supply units in them. These units have only a certain number of hours engineered into them and they are very expensive to replace—about half the price of the original computer, not counting labor and handling if shipments to a depot are required.

And it remains that even if WCG is a very low processing demander (my meters indicate otherwise—at least 30 percent of my CPU when everything else my PC was doing totaled about 50 percent) and a person accepts the idea that the throttle also slows down his/her own work, it remains that WCG is absorbing some of the lifespan of the volunteers’ computers.

So, finally, I get to the point of all this verbage. I DO NOT see a warning to this effect in the front-end promotional pages of this website. I think that is being less than honest with WCG’s good-spirited but computer-naïve volunteers.

--Here’s an example of the issue I raise here. I recently saw some fellow being enthused-over in his group for achieving one-million points. I did a rough calculation on that number. It meant that he ran his computer 24/7 for about 14 months. That’s a lot of power-supply usage and most of that time was without the CPU-throttle now available and which, incidentially, I was advised to not install as I didn’t need it, that WCG was so low a processing demander and always ran in the background that I was unnecessarily concerned.

It now appears very very likely that this advice is not only incorrect but also highly misleading—unintentionally, I’m sure—but misleading, nonetheless.

I suspect that the gentleman being praised by his group hasn’t realized that his one-million-point achievement represents a sizable part of his PC’s lifespan. I’m a heavy PC-user and I noted that your “hours” report for me during a 31-hour/HP2 run that spanned a full day and parts of the preceding and succeeding days was 20 hours. That means that despite my concentrated industrialness, I actually used my PC only four hours out of 24 that day.

Is it ethical to not reveal all the trade-offs on the front-end, even with a most-worthy purpose involved of cutting-edge medical research?

I think not. By right of my being an amateur scientist in my own research areas, I believe that I could not allow a research project to continue that placed living beings at such a risk as I have discussed here without full disclosure of the facts prior to inserting them into the research process.

I hope all readers will read this lengthy posting for comprehension prior to responding, and I further hope that this message will be forwarded in its entirety to the WCG directors for their professional consideration since it has a direct bearing on the entire project as well as their research methodology and their moral and ethical codes.

And I’m sorry for potentially poking sticks in your spokes here in plain view of the public but I have no other means of writing any of you at the senior levels.

Jim Liddell

The answer to this one is pretty easy.
1. Buy dell. Their powersupply's have been tested to not die on you like EVERY other generic out there. And it's not physically possible to pay less and get better. They're selling 2.53ghz celeron 533 bus, with monitor, mouse, keyboard 80gig HD, Cdrom, 256megs ram, windows, for $299 and no interest till 2007 if you like!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh yeah, 1 year warranty and the computer is as close to silent as you can get (because they use oversized heatsinks with shrowds and large fans that spin variable to temperature) While at 100 percent cpu, it will be more audible.

2. If you buy dell, you will NOT have a problem with cpu's or powersupplys or hd's or ram basically ever. I'm currently ranked #860 or so in results returned.

If you're worried about money, multiply your cost per a kilowatt hour vs about 100 watts I'd guess, because I'd guess that 100 percent cpu causes your computer to draw about 100 watts more than idle. That is a pure guess, you can find exact numbers I am sure. Yeah, depending on the processor that number is probably very wrong. That's your real cost.

Yes indeed - and with schools and universities running grid software, in the 24 hour computer labs the machines never cool down. I think they know what they're doing. :-)

"It's not what you don't know that will hurt you, it's what you do know that isn't so." Power supply lifetime! . . . Counting down a limited life time until the power supply dies! !?! There ARE a lot of issues involving power supplies, but I can only think that your guru has misunderstood something. The only thing that I can think of that matches up with your guru's 'facts' is the electro-migration of material in the chips, which is guaranteed to cause problems when combined with heat issues over a period of decades. If you intend to pass your computer down to your son and grandson, this becomes a real issue. Aside from this, a good computer can last a long time. The parts most vulnerable to wear and tear are the drives, and these are the parts that are being obsoleted quickly now, as capacities soar and prices drop and people get used to storing multi-gigabytes of video and audio data on them.

Lawrence

I have four obsolete computers in working order (The oldest a Mac Classic), and when I heard that my Internet provider no longer would pay "Norton anti-virus" for protection of Windows 98 on my newest IBM and I at the same time saw a television show on Norwegian Public TV (NRK) describing WCG. I decided to become a cruncher. I bought an Acer because that was what my nearest, best, and least expensive repairman sold. If you have been a tourist to Norway you should know the Lysefjord and the Pulpit Rock (Preikestolen). Well its beautiful scenery, but boy can we have lightnings and thunder, and since I live in the foothills of the Lysefjorden massive my last computer was burned out twice by lightning, ICs on the communication board with literally burned hole through. My repairman fixed it for less than 100 bucks and that is not expensive in this country. A fifth of what I paid as my part on another occasion when it was handled by an Insurance Company. I've served you enough BS.
Point is: I turned the new computer on and I want to see if it is worn out before it is obsolete.
I sleep in the very room so I turn it off most nights.