I hope this does not offend anyone here. I have only started to get into this distributed computing thing after all these years of puters. I remember reading about it going way back to the late 90's, but I was just not interested enough to follow up.
I believe I had and Anand account 1st around 1997, but long forgot about it, but have always read Anand and Tom's back in the day. Going back to the jump from 486s to 586s or Pentiums or whatever.
I did not keep up in the early 2000's so much cause of family and kids... But still built a puter when I could afford it, until the laptops where just easier for family.
So my own last laptop was 2014, an I7 4 core, that throttles if you look at it wrong , even though it is a 17" monster. I still use it remotely at least every other week and it still works well.
When Ryzen came out I and a few friends just had to have an 8 core for audio and video home projects. Settled on a 1700x. It really helped to bring the 3 of us together as we mostly worked remotely and only collaborated in person every other month or so. We had forgot how much we liked spending time together over audio / video production!
Anyway, and I could go on and on, but won't....
I started using our older equipment to run BOINC and primarily WCG. It's not a lot, but every year or so it is building.
I am now seeing that there is some smack talking in these threads from other teams, and the serious amount of effort that several of you put into this thang!
It is for me a whole new world opening up, and with the COVID, situation and myself working from home and around several puters, something to focus on for fun. And to learn puter stuff once again.
I will let you know I do like competition, and am really now debating the next puter upgrade within reason. Was going to be a 5950x or so, but now just might need to wait for the threadripper update for 32 cores? As it should work well for video?
Thanks for the help on the BOINC instances. I am creating .bat files for starting the client and the manager going forward. Had some time to read up on this stuff and am close to almost knowing what I am doing!