KWSN Orbiting Fortress

[whollymoly]

Hi, folks -

I've been a member at KWSN since 2/2/2001. I currently have what is, to me, an inexplicable problem.

I have two nearly identical computers - one at home, one at the office. They are Dell desktops with P4 processors (2.8 at home, 2.4 at work - the only difference).

At home, I process a data unit in about 3.5 hours. When I first got the computer at work, it also took about that much time. It USED to. Now...it takes more than thirty hours, nearly ten times as long.

The office-work computer is part of a local area network of about five computers inmy office, but that never made a difference before. Nor have my "preference" settings changed.

What I DID do at work was, when my hard drive got fried and I had it replaced (i.e.: all software had to be re-installed), I originally downloaded BOINC, but my IT guy found that BOINC (which didn't work anyway) was so incompatible with other items I need to run (and it didn't work anyway)that we deleted it and re-downloaded the regular original SETI. Neither computer uses BOINC for this reason, nor do I particularly want to try to mess with that, right now anyway.

Since then, it's been sloooowww. What do I do ? I have no clue, nor does my IT guy, who is in every other way very sharp. Thanks in advance....if possible, even email me at whollymoly@aol.com.

[Cohiba]

Two scenarios i check when i run into this problem. A what else is running what drivers, progs etc are running on the home computer. It also could be spyware recommend ad-aware by lavasoft just to check. Also when was the last time you checked the fans on the processors and heat sinks? If they are caked with dust or not working they will cause the p4 which has interesting heat tolerances and cause p4's to throttle back to prevent the cpu from overheating. So i'm willing to bet if you made sure no spyware is on your pc and that you don't have a ton of extra programs running, ie weatherbug, screensaver etc... check the hardware for overheating. Heatsink could have even shifted and causing the cpu to over heat.
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Smoke-em if you got-em I do..

[Grawlfang]

and this is just one of the reasons I don't run windows on machines I have control over. I had a similar problem with an old windoze98 machine a while back, turned out to be caused by me swapping graphics cards and the old driver consuming vast amounts of CPU as it struggled to find the right driver (which, sadly, it never did, though this didn't stop it trying, bless it).

Ni!
Fang