Folding Forum

Hello. Sorry I am new to this and I thought that my PC would be able to help while I am at work, which is most of the day. I browsed through the forums and did not see what I needed. Is there a way to set the program to run during certain periods of the day, say 1am to 3pm. Otherwise it is bogging down my system when I want to use it. Any help would be appreciated.

Welcome to the forum, quamba.

There's no functionality like that currently in the client. The closest approximation is to run the client as a service and then set up a scheduled task to run and stop it at your desired times. Note that this will only work if you're folding on the CPU only, as Microsoft prevents GPUs from being used by services in Vista/7/8 (XP it would work).

What hardware are you running, and what is the Folding Power slider set to in your client? The default option of Medium is supposed to run as unobtrusively as possible, leaving a CPU core free for other tasks and only folding on the GPU (if a supported one is present) when the system is idle. Full can present lag as the GPU is folding all the time and GPUs have no real scheduling to handle multiple high-priority tasks.

The way the client is originally configured, it shouldn't be capable of "bogging down your system". CPU folding runs at a very low priority and should be suspended whenever an outside process needs CPU resources that are being used by folding. Even beyond that it runs leaving a full core unused for anything else GPU folding does not have that capability but it's default configuration runs only when the machine is idle (like a screensaver). This would be at the default power of medium and you can modify it down from there by changing the power-slider to make it even less intrusive.

Only if the power slider is at full, should folding be able to bog down your machine. There, the GPU will fold constantly and that can cause lag.