Seti with a Laptop

[CheesePoofs]

I had a very old laptop handed down to me (celeron 500mhz), and I'd like to run seti on it. The problem is, this thing has terrible battery life, and I dont' want to hurt it any more. Is there any program to make seti@home (classic) run only when the computer is using the plug? Or does seti@home not especially affect battery life?

Thanks

 

[Smoke]

Seti definitely will use up more battery. You might have to do away with the shortcut in your startup folder and just manually start Seti when you are on AC. That's how I do when I'm traveling. 😉

 

[CheesePoofs]

I would do that, but I doubt anyone else in my family will remember to do it. 🙁

 

[Smoke]

Put a sticky note on it. 😀

 

[GLeeM]

I think Scheduled Task stop a task when on battery.

You could set it to start when you want, also to run only when the computer is idle, for WinXP anyway, not sure about other OS's.

 

[CheesePoofs]

The laptop's running Windows 98 SE. Where would I find the scheduled task thing?

 

[amdxborg]

I once did find a program on the net that stopped seti from running when the laptop went on battery, but for the life of me I can't find it now!! 🙁 I'll keep looking! 😉

 

[petrusbroder]

The problem has a simple solution if you use BOINC! There you can set your profile to run BOINC only when on mains power.
Look at General: specify when and how BOINC uses your computer
For the server/desktop/other non-battery powered computers this setting does not matter.



Edit: added last line.

 

[CheesePoofs]

I used the scheduled tasks and now seti should run only when there is battery power (I can't test it cause I dont' have a working battery for this laptop yet). Only problem I have is I can't figure out how to start seti minimized. I personally wouldn't care, but I don't want the rest of my family to get scared to death when a strange window appears on bootup. I tried setting scheduled tasks to run a seti shortcut which was set to have seti run minimized, but it wouldnt' do that. Any ideas?