i have a dell with pentium d at 2.2 ghz and like 256 mb of ram, and i run boinc and the sulfur cycle almost exclusively by themnselves. one problem is that my timesteps take like 5.7 seconds each. The biggest problem, however, is that if i leave boinc running overnight, and i come back to check after ten hours, it will only have added about 5 hours to my cpu time. I know that nothing else is running to use cpu time, so something is amiss.

---

256M of ram is enough to run Windows, but if you want to run applications, you need more. e.g. 512M.
cpdn is very data intensive, and a Celeron doesn\'t have as large a cache as a Pentium P4. So, with a lack of ram, your computer is going to spend a lot of time swapping data between the ram it has, and the page file on your hd.

<b>\"640 kilobytes is all the memory you will ever need\"</b> (Bill Gates)

If not much else is running, 256 might work with BOINC/CPDN as CPDN doesn\'t need so very much, but be sure to avoid stuff like quickstart for IE, office sidebar, index service, desktop backgrounds, animated cursors and maybe reduce color depth to 16 bit / 65536 colors.

Screensaver should be just \"switch off\", reducing CPU speed on a laptop is something that might explain the leak of CPU time too.


I have one Win2k Server PC running with 512MB RDRAM with 4 BOINC tasks and still there\'s RAM left, no swap activities.