SB Newbie Questions

[markhl]

Hi! I have run various DC projects for about 7 years, under the username markhl.

I have an eMachines D5039 with a 3 GHz P4, 512 MB RAM, Windows XP Home SP2. I'm getting about 3.2M cEM/sec, using 93% CPU per Task Manager. Some SB questions:

1: My CPU fan gets noisy above 80% CPU usage. Is there a CPU throttle setting like Throttle=n for the Prime95 program? Other than winThrottle or other third-party software?

2: Do I just join a team by pasting the team name into the Team box of the Config?

Thanks!

[Vato]

I'm not aware of any CPU usage throttle I'm afraid. It would be a useful feature for noise/heat/power reduction, and would probably increase the lifetime of your fan bearings.

As for joining a team, login to the website, and select the Preferences option at the top left, then the required links will be under the Team Affiliation section. I don't believe the Team section in the client config file does anything anymore - I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong...

[Death]

better find a better fan. really.

)))

[markhl]

Thanks everyone.
One more thing: the icon has disappeared from the system tray.
How can I bring up the client window?
I'm not running SB as a service.

[DOSGuy]

If you're not running the client as a service, it should be visible. Windows may have hidden your inactive icons, or it may not be running.

Just a couple of things that came to mind. eMachines makes budget computers. (I don't want to use the word crap, but let's just say that my friends who bought an eMachines computer have sworn to never buy another.) In this case, the weak point in your system is the 512 MB of RAM. Ideally Windows XP should have at least 1 GB, and your system performance would probably noticeably improve if it did. If you have the opportunity to upgrade, that would be a good idea and might extend the useful life of your machine.

Second, you didn't say what kind of Pentium 4 you have, so there's a possibility that your CPU has either Hyper-threading or is dual core. In either case, you could be running two clients instead of one, but only if you run the client as a service. You can find out if your CPU has two cores/threads by running a simple program like CPU-Z. If it does, you could install SoB as a service and run "sobsvc -o" or "sobsvc -o2" and SoB might detect your second core/thread. If it only assigns one client, try "sobsvc -p:2:0". You might want to try "sobsvc -p:2:0" anyway to see if the results are better with two clients or one floating client if you have Hyper-threading rather than dual core.

[markhl]

Thanks for the advice! I agree that this eMachines is a budget PC and will look into getting more RAM.
Not sure about upgrading the cooling fan. (A CPU throttle sure would be a nice feature - some other DC programs offer that.)
CPU-Z shows me that this is a single-core unfortunately.
After a couple of reboots, the icon did come back to the system tray.
I joined the US-Distributed team.