is there a way
 

to have prime kick in a higher pority after like 15 min of idle time and have to go back to porority 1 after it detects activity?

Changing priority will make little or no difference...

There are hundreds of things you can do that are simpler, safer and have a greater effect... (Like removing AOL!)

:(

i was thinking more to combat screen savers after the monitor when into power saver mode


i am running this on a freinds comptuer and i promised that they woudnt no it was there

however he runs matrix screen saver but he also has his montiro go into standbuy after 15 min

so if you cant see the screen saver you could up the priority on prime and get some actuall work done.

Once the DPMS blanks out the screen I think the screensaver isn't drawn anymore...

How soon does the Matrix screensaver kick in ?

If that ( Matrix kick in time) was known and the amount of time it (Matrix) has been running then the fifteen minutes could be known.

A more direct way is using an API call (in Prime95) or small utility that can detect if a monitor is in Standby/Shutdown that could then write/modify a text/ini file (for Prime95 to check) or directly change the process and thread priorities of a second program.

I use ATM under Win98SE and it can change the priority of Prime95 both at a process level and the two threads ( only one thread is used for the main work, the other has very little execution time ). I never change the priority from within Prime95.

So it is possible to change the priorities programmatically, but is it possible to detect a monitor going into energy saving mode(s) ?

[quote="Xyzzy"]Once the DPMS blanks out the screen I think the screensaver isn't drawn anymore...[/quote]

i think its going to be the classical lights in the refredoator problem


however i know if you unplug the montior and plug it back in it will come back up from sleep and show you the screen saver

so it is my belife that it is running

i supsose all i would have to do is look at the itteration times but the comptuer is like 2 hours away



i would definelty think this woudl add some strenth to prime if there was a overide screensaver in sleep mode option in prime.

[quote="crash893"]
i think its going to be the classical lights in the refredoator problem[/quote]
Dude, that question has been bothering me for years...

Currently I'm absolutely sure that the screensaver does continue to run when the monitor is in power-off state (at least under Win 98SE). That's how I realised this.

I was running the distributed.net's RC5 project on a desktop Celeron 900 MHz machine. On that computer the SereneSoft Aquarium screensaver was installed as the system's screensaver. These beautiful fishes take a lot of CPU's power to render (it's 3D, and this computer has integrated graphics). After some time I began to ask myself, why did the RC5 performance drop down when the computer was not used (the monitor changed to power-off mode), although the power management settings (excepting those for the monitor and hard disk) were set to "Always on"? As I noticed, while the system was not used, the RC5 crunching progress tended to reach the zero.

I thought it might be a Celeron's "feature", to slow down when the computer was not used. I even wrote to Intel's support, asking about such a feature, but didn't get a useful answer (just that "Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading" advertising-like information). I was so surprised by this behaviour also because the P4 machine I use, running Prime95, got a better performance when it was not used (later I realised, it was so because it was running a simple Windows standard screensaver, taken together with the fact, that it wasn't used by other user applications).

But when I went to bed one evening (about two weeks ago), a thought flashed through my mind: the screensaver might remain active even when the monitor is powered off by Windows! (There couldn't be another explanation.)

Next day I disabled the screen saver on both the Celeron and P4 computers. And things got to normal state: the machines were crunching faster when they were not used (the monitors were off-ed by Windows). With P4 running Prime95 I got a timing shift from 0.126 to 0.120 sec/iteration (that's almost 5% performance increase), after I turned the screensaver off!

Now I'm trying to find out, how to make the screensaver shutdown when the monitor gets into the stand-by and power-off states ('cause I'd rather let the screensaver run for those 10 mins, but I don't want to lose the CPU cycles for the screeensaver when it is not visible). :confused:

You could use the blank screensaver... I doubt it uses many cycles... :(

The MS screenwrecker, like their other products, is extremely primitive and intended to run at defaults compatible with a 1996 computer, i.e., a 166. There isn't any provision in the code to allow 3d stuff unless called for by an external app, as in gaming.

[quote="Xyzzy"]You could use the blank screensaver... I doubt it uses many cycles... :([/quote]

yes but that would break my promise to have no noticable interferances with his comptuer