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Welcome to chasing aliens all over the sky!

I believe that the Seti@home servers have really been straining in the last couple of weeks, so accessing/creating accounts can be a hit or miss thing.  I think the team is doing some maintenance/upgrades on the Web server side of things, so you may want to try your first account again with the CLI client.  (to get it to go through the login proceedure again you may have to trash the "user.sah" file)

For putting the monitor to sleep (I'm assuming that you're running Jaguar), in System Preferences, select "Screen Effect".  In the "Screen Effect" tab, select a screen saver ("Computer Name" uses the fewest CPU cycles - leaving more for Seti!), in the "Activiation" tab select how much idle time before the screen automatically goes to sleep (you can choose to lock your screen here as well) and last, but not least, in the "Hot Corners" tab select a corner to activate the screen saver on demand (I use bottom left).  Now go back to the "Screen Effects" tab and push the "Open Energy Saver" button, this will take you to the "Energy Saver" preferences.  In the "Sleep" tab chose "Never" for "Put the computer to sleep ...", select "Use separate time to put the display to sleep" and select a time (I use 15 min for the screen saver in Screen Effects and 1 hr for sleep in Energy Saver)  Do NOT select "Put the hard disk to sleep ...", I don't know about Jaguar, but other operating systems running Seti@home have experienced problems with this one.  Seti@home needs to be able to hit the hard drive every couple of minutes and doesn't have much error in the way of error handling while waiting for the drive to spin up.

This lets you park the mouse in the lower left corner of the screen and have the screen saver immediately activate.  The "Computer Name" saver is quite dark. And sometime later the monitor goes to sleep.  Wiggle the mouse, log on and all is where you left off.


HTH

Great!

Now, don't forget to join Team MacAddict at Seti@home.

I run the client with a helper application called Seti Menu.  It puts a nice small progress bar up by the clock and allows you to control Seti@home from the GUI.  You can also select the priority you are going to give Seti@home, so that it gets as much CPU time as possible without getting in the way.  I use a "Nice" level of "1" (on a scale of 0 to 19).  The higher the number the "nicer" Seti will be to other applications.  (So with a nice of 19, Seti won't get much time at all, with a nice of 0, it will be competing direclty with everything else you're doing)  Selecting a "nice" level will depend on your personal circumstances.  (i.e.: if you edit video for a living you may want a nice of 10 or so!)  I also put it in my "Login Items" list, so that I don't have to worry about re-starting the client after loggin in. 

If you want to run the client without having to be logged in, there is a way, using cron.  See:  http://www.macaddict.com/setiex/setiathome.html

You can pick up Seti Menu at http://perso.wanadoo.fr/vigan/aksoft/index.html for free.

Have fun!

That'll teach me to put a comma at the end of a URL!!!! ;->

Me fix