donate your spare cpu cycles · believe it or not, most of the time your computer is doing nothing, literally. if power is supplied to your computer, then it must continually execute instructions. if you're not telling it what to do (browse the web, read email, etc.) then what's it doing? this is oversimplified, but basically your computer is spinning its wheels in something called the "idle" process. if you have windows nt or 2000, do a ctrl-alt-del (or right-click on the task bar) and bring up the task manager. you will notice that the idle process probably accounts for using 95% or more of the cpu cycles that have been available since you started your machine. in a nutshell, this means that most of the computing power of your machine is simply wasted.

there are things that you can do with that wasted computing time, and one of those is to add your machine to a distributed computing network. a distributed computing network is essentially a collection of machines that are all cooperatively participating in some sort of computation. until this year i tended to shy away from these projects, but a few months ago i decided to give it a try when i learned about the cancer research project being run by united devices.

i've been donating the spare cpu time of two machines for a couple of months now, and i believe the united devices projects are very well run and their software is very stable. if you've ever thought of participating in a distributed computing project, i encourage you to follow the link above and check this one out. if this is a new idea to you, you should follow the link above and learn more. you'd be amazed at the difference your one pc can make!

as an added final bonus, when the ud agent is running as a screen saver, it makes your machine look really cool ... :)