Using my idle computer for something useful (seti@home and the like) [closed]

"A few of the more popular ones:

SETI@Home - searching for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Folding@Home - simulating protein folding, with potential applications to a lot of problems in biology.
GIMPS - searching for very large primes.
BOINC - a framework for many different distributed computing projects, including SETI@Home.

Wikipedia has an extensive list of distributed computing projects."

"I'd recommend using BOINC (as stated in other posts). Once installed, it sits in the background, waiting until the computer is idle.

But I would not recommend leaving your PC on just for the sake of running BOINC -- just let it fill out the natural gaps in your normal work routine, and when you're done for the day, put your PC to sleep or turn it off.

This way BOINC works during your small breaks, and that can add up too. And at the same time you're not spending energy to run your PC just for the sake of BOINC -- best of both sides, eh?"

and more projects at the GridCafé

"I'm using my idle computer for GIGRIB.

It is distributed website monitoring service. If you participate your bandwidth will be used to detect if websites are down and in turn you can have your own websites monitored."