I have updated the download link here for the new BOINC version for Linux & Windows. Note that we do not have Mac yet but we hope to have a Mac Intel OS X version up within a month (contact tolu at atm dot ox dot ac dot uk to join the Mac Intel beta test).

Version 5.8.8 should be safe to upgrade to if you are still using the original BBC/CCE/BOINC software from last February (I believe it renames the directory to \"BOINC\" so that this and future upgrades are correct).

Some of the new features (from the BOINC website):

* The BOINC Manager offers two different interfaces: \'Simple\' (small, graphical, skinnable) and \'Advanced\' (maximum information). The Simple GUI allows local editing of preferences. You can switch back and forth between Simple and Advanced.
* CPU throttling: you can reduce CPU heat by limiting the fraction of time that BOINC computes.
* Improved scheduling policies avoid missing job deadlines even on a slow computer with lots of projects.
* You can limit the amount of memory used by BOINC; this lets you compute all the time without losing performance.
* Mac OS X version runs applications in an unpriviledged account, increasing security.
* Snooze button (in the system tray icon) lets you stop computing for one hour.

We recommend that all BOINC users upgrade to 5.8.

I have been running some of the 5.8 pre-release candidates and I really loved them. All my machines have been updated to the current 5.8.8 release.

The throttling is very awesome, but does not work as some people expect. I had a laptop getting a little warm, so I changed it to 90% and now my RAC has risen because the heat throttling doesn\'t happen anymore. How it works is if you set it at 50%, you machine will run 100% for 1 second, then idle for 1 second. At 90% it runs 9 seconds at 100% and 1 second at idle. So you may never see the idle time because it happens so quickly. It does work, though.

I am not a fan of the simple GUI, but it is kind of neat looking, and people are already making all kinds of new skins for it.

Paused/Prempted is now called \"Waiting To Run\".

If you tell projects you want 1 day of work, it schedules better to take all projects into consideration, and makes it 1 day for all projects, not 1 day for each (of course CPDN is not affected by this).

It does not go into EDF mode so willy-nilly. It is a lot smarter in that aspect.

If you are on any of the 5 versions, just stop BOINC and reinstall over the current install. If running some of the older 4 versions, you need to uninstall (do not delete the folders), and install over the folder.

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Thanks for the information. Found that download from the Berkeley server is very much faster: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

\" If you are on any of the 5 versions, just stop BOINC and reinstall over the current install. \"

POOH BEAR:
What happens to the backup? Will 5.8.8 auto-adjust the existing backup?

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