Why only one box will be folding...

[Pinky]

I made a backup of Almost Famous, which I own on DVD, for fun last night (to learn and see how good the SVCD quality really is). I then wanted to test it in my Apex DVD player so I burned a copy. When playing it back I noticed various forms of distortion in the image every 5-15 seconds.

I decided to try top lower the write speed and turn off folding (I have burned a hundred cds at 24X and never had any issues, so the fact I burned data at 12X shouldn't matter here). Burned with folding off and the cd came out flawlessly.

My concern is this: if data is being "corrupted" or mis-interpretted during a CD burn on a Plextor drive with burn-proof, how much data being written between the hard drives is being corrupted and I just haven't seen it yet? (or maybe have in the form of the occassional unexplainable error)

Don't tell me my overclock is "poor", the damn thing runs every test I throw at it with flying colors.

I will be leaving folding on the duron box indefinitely, I won't lose sleep if I lost data on that drive.

[SteveI]

Not surprising, I get similar results when burning cds. While burnproof helps a lot, the bottom line is that CDRWs demand continuous attention from the CPU... If it does not get it,.....coasters. Don't think of it as corrupt data, think of it as no data when the CDRW wants it. The burnproof helps here, but is not infallible. When I do very intensive CPU stuff, like burn CDs or video encode, I usually turn folding off temporarily. This doesn't hurt my folding time, since the cycles would have gone to those other apps anyway.

[Pinky]

Good point/explanation steve, but I demand 100% of my cpu's attention all the time I'm on it, so it doesn't seem to make sense for me to continue leaving it running on my main rig (hence "farms" where people just have boxes with little else running on them other than folding... of course, you wouldn't know anything about that ). I've been turning off folding for a while now when doing cpu intensive applications. It's gotten annoying, last night was just the last straw!

[S_Wilson]

I understand what you are saying Pinky, I shut mine down from time to time on my main box also. Mainly, there are three situations where I will shut down; Video encoding, burning and league night for Nascar racing 2002 online. What I do is use the graphical client and have an icon on my desktop. Right click the icon in sys tray and click quit and when I'm done double click the desktop icon and I'm back in business.

As for the rest of the time, corruption and crashes aren't an issue. If you can leave it running while you are asleep or at work that would be great because we need this on as many boxes as possible.