CE also works towards better vaccines and clean water, by the way. We know that they save more lives than pretty much anything else on Earth (along with Vit A/zinc supplements), so CE constantly crunches for malaria.net and one of our supported charities is Water Aid.

You can override the default CPU usage at any time by clicking ‘preferences’ on the app. Allows you to select anything from 10% – 100%, and also to schedule when it’s active, when it can connect to the net, etc. You can customise everything.

However, I downloaded and started running, and the fan on my laptop (Acer Aspire 5742, Intel Core i5 CPU) went into overdrive. I’ve never really noticed the fan before, even playing Minecraft! I could turn the noisy fan off by pressing Pause on Charity Engine and waiting a few seconds, then turn it back on by pressing Resume. This freaked me a bit so I uninstalled. An option to limit CPU usage below your 60% mark to my own level would have been good (unless I missed it?).

CE does reserve some of the grid for Africa@home (malaria research) and gives them any unsold capacity as well.

As in, were I to be a user of Charity Engine, my computer would be crunching corporate data, and the fees charged that corporation are forwarded to charities and users?

Edit: And people are willing to do this, without FHE being useful yet?

Charity Engine deliberately doesn’t use ‘everything’. Your CPU won’t go higher than the efficiency sweet spot of 60%, because a PC can cruise at that all day long for just another 7-8% power (< 10 watts) compared to idling. Shouldn't even kick the fans in.

And if your CPU is already being used more than 60%, CE uses nothing.
Cheers,Mark
(from Charity Engine)

We were very careful to make sure CE is super-efficient. It won’t run a CPU past 60% and typically only costs <10p per day if run as a background task. You can take a CPU from 5% to 60% usage for no more extra power than charging an iPhone. You'll double the power to make it run at 100%, though (and spin the fans up, etc), so we don't do that.

Re. sleeping/suspend, etc. We don't want people leaving PCs on just for this, that spoils the efficiency. Just have it ticking away in the background when you ARE using your PC, then it's providing the most efficient – and most ethical – computing on the planet. Cheers, Mark

Just DL ‘original’ BOINC then attach to charityengine.com as your Account Manager (NOT as a project). 

We’ll make that easier soon. So much dev, so little time… ;)

a pretty much idling pc running torrents will use a lot less power than a pc running with the CPU maxed out with software like this.

Depends on the power usage difference between your CPU under load and idle to know whether it’s worth it really.

I might run this myself during the colder months, but not during the summer. My PC is a bit like a spaceheater when loaded :)

Well, only when it isn’t running. Once BOINC activates, it’ll be any available CPU cycle it can get…and that’s a direct link to power usage. I’vebeen running SETI@Home for 12 years or so, and can attest..they’re only “idle” cycles until they’re being used, and then they become “space heater cycles”.

It seems to me that, although there are far less Linux users, we’d be far more likely to want to do this.  But, there you go.

“Charity Engine typically adds less than 10 cents per day to a PC’s energy costs and can generate $10-$20 for charity – and the prize draws – for each $1 of electricity consumed.”

Is nobody actually reading that, or is everyone assuming it’s all lies, and they can figure out the true cost/benefit ratio by the power of guessing?

Better those cycle be given to digital revolutionary applications like youtube/facebook and Geatiful…. at least for current generation it would be worth…. ;)