I’ve got an old box or two sitting around not doing anything. If I put these boxes back on the network and downloaded this program, would they be of any help if they are doing nothing but running this (and their OS)? We’re talking PII class machines.
A PII is slow but might finish a work unit in 50 days if you have decent memory. There are still about 10,000 Win 98 and about 50 Win 95 systems crunching away somewhere in the world.
Now, if these systems cost you money to get them working, leave them alone. I can justify the cost of electricity even for a slow system, but at some point the cost:benefit ratio won’t work. Work with 128 MB if possible.
You can try it out and all it costs will be a few discarded work units (don’t tell Stanford!). If the FAHlog.txt shows 1% every 12 hours then it will work fine.
By comparison, I get 1% every 20 - 25 minutes on my slower ATI card. The fastest GPU runs a tough work unit at about 1% every 6:45 minutes.
Make sure that you do not ask for large work units and turn off all screensavers etc.