This will keep the program from waiting for you to manually connect. If you cannot do this because you have a dial-up connection, you might want to set up a workunit caching program, so that you can have a cache of workunits to crunch during the lag tome before connecting. Several caching programs can be found here.

The program only uses resources that are not being used for any other purpose, since its priority is set to the lowest possible priority. If you are running a resource-hungry game, you might want to turn the program completely off while its running. Similarly, if you have only 32M of RAM, you might not want to run the program at all times, since it might slow other programs slightly.

If you keep the GUI client closed/minimized to the system tray, it will dramatically reduce your processing times. The graphics use a lot of resources & slow processing to a crawl. The program runs very well in the system tray & does not need to be open to run (as long as you have set your preferences to have the program always run). If you want to see your progress, you can use SetiSpy, which has a very small memory footprint & should not affect your processing times at all. You can get SetiSpy HERE!

The screensaver also uses a lot of resources & will slow processing to a crawl. To get your best processing efficiency, either disable all screensavers, of change the SETI@home screensaver settings to go to blank screen in 0 minutes. This will speed up processing by HOURS! Virtually all monitors do not need screensavers to prevent "burn-in" on the screen -- this was a problem that was solved years ago.

The program periodically writes results to a small file on your hard drive. If the hard drive is not spinning, the program will just wait until you "wake" it up. The processing time will still register the time that the program is waiting while this delay occurs. There is no problem with setting your monitor to power down, and since that is the biggest energy-user on your idle computer, that is not a bad idea at all.