I have a laptop with an AMD64 3000+, 512mb of RAM and also a desktop PC that has an AMD 3200+ with 1.5gb of RAM. Both are running Windows XP SP1.

I have been running BOINC on my laptop with no problems, and it has been keeping me steadily supplied with S@H, LHC, Pirates@H, and CP work units. I just switched my desktop from S@H classic to BOINC. For S@H classic, my desktop PC can do a WU in about 2.5 hrs while the laptop takes about 5 hrs. No idea why.

My problem is that when I set up BOINC on my desktop tonight (which I set up to only run S@H, Pirates@H, and LHC since it's faster than my other machines), it only downloaded 2 S@H WUs and 6 LHC WUs. On the contrary, my laptop, which has always taken longer to process results, downloaded 17 S@H WUs and 22 LHC WUs. These make sense, since it takes about 59 minutes to do a LHC WU, and the S@H results seem to be going faster now.

What I don't understand is why my desktop, which always used to be faster, is now only getting a fraction of the WUs it should be. I'm not looking to horde WUs, just make sure I have enough to process should a project go down (as S@H now has for the night). And I checked LHC and they have enough WUs to go around. Both computers were using the same location settings.

Any ideas?

Edit: I had this idea. Is it possible that the measurements for "% of time client is on", "% of time host is connected", and "% of time user is active" have anything to do with my problem? For my desktop PC I'm seeing about 12.5% for all three of those readings, while on my laptop it's showing 99.98%. Maybe the servers are issuing work to my desktop PC based on the assumption that it's not running very much, so why give it lots of work to do? Maybe?