How "fast" an i7??

3.8GHz-4Ghz does it for me.

The SMP2 cores will be out soon and may well use it. If you've got an 8 core mac pro then you can crunch the new bigadv units which if you finish them in 3 days are worth 50,000 points. Fast i7's running Linux can also run them.

In my Extra Parameters box I currently have:
-smp

Should I have that? And should I add -bigadv too?

You need the modified core from here
You need the lines. -smp 8 -bigadv
you can add -verbosity 9 to the end as well if you want more indepth info.

You will also need a passkey registered for your username & to have completed 10 normal smp units with that passkey.

The WU's are worth 25000 points but if you complete them in 3 days or less you get a 100% bonus.

I have added one of my machines to the x404 user stats.

I did a unit once but the rig I was using was so decrepit that the power use per unit wasn't really justifiable at the time.

One question that I've not found an answer to, do any companies actually profit (moneywise) from all of this free numbercrunching? I'm thinking of Pharmaceutical companies in particular.

Yes but I have one machine on all the time for other tasks so it was not really a problem.

The results are made freely available AFAIK to anyone who wants them. Nobody makes any money from it as once a cure is in the open a drugs company wouldn't have an exclusive product.

I shall have to have another goosey, I may have some old kit that's not so decrepit that I could get running. I'll have to look to see how their research has been used.

I presume, from what you say, it's open to the world scientific community rather than being kept with the domain of the US and associated companies.

Open to everyone I believe

Full details are here

I see two people have asked what folding is and I can't see any replies so I ain't gonna ask.

I answered pie!

Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases

What is protein folding?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Protein folding is linked to disease, such as Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers
Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

umm

me and tech guys still cant really make sense of it

Basically instead of trying to build a massive supercomputer to crunch these numbers they farm it out to anybody who's got spare computer cycles available.
A bit like seti@home etc

From what I make of it, medical research has some big numbers to crunch. Rather than buying a huge machine and doing it themselves, they can pump bits of work out to you and me and others and we'll do the work for them. I do my little bit of work, and you do yours, and the rest of the forum does their bits of work. Then we send back the answers. The medical research folks get this work 'for free' and we feel like we've done something good.

As I understand it, there is then a whole points based system behind all this to make it all a little more fun and competitive. The more work you do for them, the more points you get.

The software dynamically adjusts itself so it's not in the way of anything your doing on your computer. If you're using 10% of your computers computational capabilities reading the BBC site, the software will use up the other 90%. If you suddenly need 90% of your system to recalculate a huge spreadsheet, the software will adjust itself to only use 10% of the system...

It's all a very interesting idea, and it's very interesting that such a thing has worked tbh...