Is there any way to limit the BOINC client to only use one CPU when it detects more than one? With a HT enabled CPU, it's counter-productive to have the same work running on both hyperthreads (It's useful when the work being done use different parts of the CPU, but not when it taxes the same part of the CPU).
Can I tell BOINC to only use one (pseudo-)CPU instead of running two in parallel?

Also, when running on different machines, BOINC doesn't seem to let me have different preferences for each machine. If I want to run one machine only when idle for 3 minutes, and another only when idle for 10 minutes, there doesn't seem to be a way to do this?

Sure there is a way. Under your account you can edit your preferences, depending on where your computers are, or where you locate them. You have 3 locations avalible: "Home", "School" and "Work". Edit them as you wish and enjoy ;)

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Under "Your Account", "General Preferences", you can edit the following line:

On multiprocessors, use at most 2 processors

to use at most 1 processor. Unless that is not what you meant.

You're right about the problem with different machines and different preferences. It's a bug in the BOINC system right now. There's some way around it by editing xml files, but I don't know how to do it.

> Under "Your Account", "General Preferences", you can edit the following line:
>
> On multiprocessors, use at most 2 processors
>
> to use at most 1 processor. Unless that is not what you meant.

The problem with this is that it's a global setting, which doesn't help much when you have multiple machines with different number of CPUs.

> You're right about the problem with different machines and different
> preferences. It's a bug in the BOINC system right now. There's some way
> around it by editing xml files, but I don't know how to do it.

Yeah, you can edit the XML files (you have to, if running Linux), but they get fetched/generated again. Apart from the unique client identifier, prefs should really be local and not global.

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> Sure there is a way. Under your account you can edit your preferences,
> depending on where your computers are, or where you locate them. You have 3
> locations avalible: "Home", "School" and "Work". Edit them as you wish and
> enjoy ;)

That works for a maximum of three different settings. Some of us have WAY more machines than that, and I'd think that those of us that do are probably the kind of people that the projects really would want joining...

Regards,
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*Art