[Caleal]

I have an old spare system with a Phenom x4 9650 CPU and GeForce 9800GT (G92) running Windows Vista.

I loaded the new v7 of the FAH client on it and set it up to do SMP and GPU folding.
It has been running for a couple of days now, but is only doing about 4000-4500 PPD.

Besides cleaning it up so that nothing but the OS and FAH clients are running, and disabling services and features in Vista that are not needed, are there any optimizations that can be done to improve its folding output?

Would changing over from Winblows Vista to Linux improve its folding output enough to be worth the trouble?

I also have a couple of old Athalon 2800+ systems laying around, but I assume their production wouldn't justify their power consumption, lol.

 

[mbudden]

I good way to get some extra PPD is run them in Linux.
I'd use a stripped down version of Ubuntu like Linux Mint LXDE.

 

[jammo2k5]

Home file server maybe too. Nas' are so handy if you have multiple Pc's likea main rig and a laptop.

 

[*the_beast*]

GPU folding is terrible in Linux so I dont think the bump in SMP PPD would offset what you loose on the GPU.

 

[Caleal]

I killed Windows Defender, Uninstalled the virus protection software, and shut down pretty much everything that was starting with windows.
It seems to be moving a bit faster now.
This weekend I'll spend some more time on it shutting down Windows services and such.

I've thought about turning it into a NAS, but I'm not sure exactly what all I could do with it that I don't already have set up on my network using my 3TB external USB3 drive as the shared/backup drive, other than having more redundancy.
I'm single and live alone, so it is just me using it.

Its an off the shelf HP Pavilion with a good(at the time) video card dropped in it, so there really isn't any room to work with in the case.
I'll have to move the guts over to one of my old ugly ATX cases if I decide to add more hard drives and some better cooling.