Folding@home

[Peegee]

Remember <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/">Folding@Home</a>? Well I have it running on two machines right now, and on this machine, it's only taking up 50% of the CPU's idle resources (it's always set to lowest priority).

It's supposed to use like 80-90% regularly, but it won't. I should inform you that I have one of those newer P4 chips that is registered by XP as two separate processors. Both processors are checkmarked in the process affinity option, so what's the matter?

[crono_logical]

Try running two at once? :p

The affinity is the preferred processor the thread will run on - if it's not a true multi-threaded multi-CPU capable program, it won't run on both at the same time. Probably best to keep only one checked, since you get much better performance if it stays on one processor than if the program is allowed to swap between processors due to the way memory works.

[Peegee]

It won't let me run two at once unfortunately, but I did modify the affinity.

On a somewhat related note, is it possible to ensure certain executables run a certain user-defined manner every time? Windows media player needs to run at high priority to be functional, for example.

[crono_logical]

I've not used Windows in a 2 CPU environment before, and have no idea if it opens up new tabs anywhere for you to define that stuff. Would be nice if it did though :p

[Peegee]

FYI: It's just affinity, as far as I can see (where's bleyz?) :D

[crono_logical]

I assume processor affinity is implied though if the checkboxes let you select processor :p

[Peegee]

Fixed it. I had to disable the hyperthreading option in BIOS. Though I had no idea why that is so or what hyperthreading even does.

*shrug*

[crono_logical]

Hyperthreading is what makes the CPU look like several CPUs to the OS. Disabling it, you might well see a performance loss in your PC now, especially when handling several CPU hungry tasks at the same time. Or then again, at such a high clock speed, you probably won't unless you try looking specifically at the performance :p