My primary PC at work, which is also my powerhouse CPDN cruncher, went through a Microsoft Office upgrade a couple of weeks ago. Upgrade was from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Ever since that day my average has been in a free fall, from +1200 down to 740 today, and shows little sign of leveling off. I\'ve tweaked my other PC\'s in an effort to keep my total average up, but I\'m still scratching my head as to why a seemingly insignificant software upgrade is killing my work output.
The PC in question is an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6700 @ 2.66GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 6]with 2 GB RAM, running Win XP Pro SP2, BOINC is a service mode install.
I\'ve tweaked it as much as know how to, even going as far as setting the boinc/model processes to a \"high\" priority with task manager. I\'ve also installed a third party ActiveSync control app from Micrologics to kill the process when I don\'t need it.
Any ideas?

Your computers are hidden, so it is going to be difficult to diagnose the problem. What is the computer/HostID of the problem PC?

Your computers are hidden, so it is going to be difficult to diagnose the problem. What is the computer/HostID of the problem PC?

They should be visible now. It is 658827.

One of your two models is OK, but the other has slowed down significantly:
http://climateapps2.oucs.ox.ac.uk/cpdnboinc/result.php?resultid=6956114

If you display the graphics, has it turned into an iceworld? (All blue on the temperature display, or all ice on the other display).

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I see that one has slowed down now, I didn\'t think I could view graphics in service install?

Should I let it continue? The estimated completion time is at 66 hours, but I see that it is increasing about one second for every 6-8 seconds that pass.

You can view them but you need to tell Windows that the service task is allowed to interact with the desktop (if you look in the READMEs you should be able to find the instructions in a link called \'installing as a service\').

The main question is - is the model actually making any meaningful progress? Make a note of it\'s %complete, leave it a day or so, and then look again. From the difference between the two, you should be able to calculate how long it will take.

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The model has changed to about 48.5 seconds per timestep (from 1.2 s/ts) and will take, oddly enough, about 48.5 days to finish. So Mike\'s right, it isn\'t Office 2007, it\'s an ice world ...

This guy here has got one trickle to go in the same work unit (on AMD), so - painful as it may seem - the best thing to do is abort it and spend the 48.5 days doing another model.

I did find an excellent Wiki on how to view graphics on a service install here: http://boinc-wiki.ath.cx/?title=Enabling_The_Graphics_Capability_of_the_BOINC_Client_Software_for_a_Service_Type_Installation
I followed the directions and was able to view a completely blue earth ~ -24C, I assume this is the ice world scenario.
Over the last hour, the % complete has gone up, but so has the estimated time to completion.
Was it just coincidence that this happened on the day I upgraded Office, or could the upgrade have corrupted the model somehow? I did suspend work during the install.

It probably was a coincidence - these iceworlds do happen by themselves. But it may be worth running a stability check on the machine for 24 hours or so (for example, Prime95\'s torture test)

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I\'ve aborted the slab project and the next one has been running for a little more than 16 hours and is already at 6.3% complete. I\'ll just accept the ice world starting the same day as the Office upgrade as a coincidence.

Thanks for the help MikeMarsUK & Iain Inglis