Are We Alone?

Worldwide, there are currently about 2.6 million people who are helping Seti in their search for coherent extraterrestrial radio signals, hoping to find an alien message.

The huge Arecibo Radio antenna gathers radio info from space, Seti@Home chops it into manageable data blocks, and the participants' computers download the blocks and analyze them, and send the results back to Seti@home for further scrutiny.

Seti can act as a screensaver, which does this work when you're away from the keyboard, or it can be run (more efficiently) as a commandline program. Either way, it's easy to set up, and it's cool to think that you may be listed as co-discoverer of an alien signal!

The members of TeamBZ who are running the Seti@home program have formed a team, you're welcome to join us. We have also compiled this resource to help you speed up your Seti@Home program's performance. You might be amazed at how fast your computer can crunch through the data blocks, and you might be intrigued by the different features you can use to see the data block's information as it processes.

The Flag of Earth

Faster Seti@Home Performance

The program most people first install to run Seti@Home is the windows screensaver. Granted, this is the easiest to install and use and it has those fascinating little pictures, but if you are more interested in finding ET than seeing pretty pictures then there are two things you can do to enhance performance.

First way... boring, but easy to set up; a simple settings change for the screensaver version.
To install the screensaver version, go to the Seti@Home website and get the latest version of the screensaver for Windows. The Seti version 3.03 is out, and fixes some bugs that were in v3.0.
Once it's installed, right click on your desktop, and hit "properties". Click the Screensaver tab. It will show that you're using the Seti@Home program as a screensaver. Click on the "Settings" button, and click on "Blank Screen after..." Now set that to 1 minute. Hit "Ok".
Now, when your screensaver pops on, you'll see the regular screensaver version for one minute, then the screensaver will disappear, and the program will run behind a blank screen, with a large increase in available power, as your computer no longer has to push that Seti animation as well as the Seti@Home program. The performance increase is about 2 times to 2.5 times the speed!
*alternative*... if you have the screensaver installed, set it to "data analysis always runs" and minimize it to the system tray. It runs constantly, and at low priority, so it doesn't interfere much with other computer activities. Use "blank screen" as your screensaver, in this case, not Seti@Home.

Second way... very cool and different look, more information, best speed possible, enhanced features, no doubt the best way to run Seti.... and still very easy to set up. First, you need to download 3 components and put them all into a new directory called "Seti".

*NOTE* Make sure you "uninstall" the Window's screensaver version of SETI before you run the new commandline version, or nasty, evil bad things happen. Like "conflicts" and "freezes" and such. Worse than 3 hour old coffee!!

The commandline version for windows 95/98/Winnt etc is available at the Seti@Home Commandline Downloads Page, or simply download it here or here and put it into the new Seti directory. The 3.03 commandline version is compatible with Intel and AMD processors, so there is no longer a need to hunt down a different version if you're running an AMD processor. You don't want to double click on that, as it will start Seti without your being ready for it yet... boring...
Version 3.03 will be mandatory soon, but more importantly, the Seti@home project needs its supporters to make the move to 3.03 as soon as possible. Not only does this version do a great deal more work with each package before it returns the result, (and so is slower than 3.0) but it helps them solve some serious bandwidth issues on their server as well. If we are really interested in helping the project, and not just in it for self aggrandizement, then consider installing 3.03 soonest. ;)
The Seti@Home client will run under Windows 95, but ensure you have the Winsock 2.0 update installed from Ms.
Now go download Seti Driver for Windows. You can visit the Seti Driver Homepage for information, or just download the file here. As of this update, Seti Driver version 1.6.2.0 is the most up to date.
Windows 95 users should DL and install the SetiDriverNinetyFive utility.
Use explorer to go to the Seti directory, and double click on Seti Driver zipfile. Extract the two files "Seti Driver.exe" (or Seti Driver95.exe) and "license.txt" into the Seti directory. Now double click on the "seti driver.exe" file. This program is what operates the commandline version. The first time you run it, go to the taskbar and bring up the commandline's DOS box. The commandline box will open, asking you if you want to start a new Seti account (hit #1) or use an existing Seti account (hit #2).
If you have an existing account, just fill in your email address. To start a new account, hit #1, and follow the questions and answer them as they come.
*NOTE* If you have already hit the "Hide Processing" button, you will not see the commandline program's request for this information. Unclick "Hide Processing" until you're sure that the program is running Ok. Otherwise it may be some time before you realize that the program is "Idle"... doing nothing at all, waiting for your attention.
To set up the Seti Driver program itself, take a look at the screencap to the right and set yours in a similar way.
One variable is the "Cache" number. This is the number of packages that Driver will download and have on hand to process. (If the Seti server ever goes down, as it tends to do periodically, you can keep crunching through those and it will send them when the server's back up) A good number to set is approximately how many your computer can process in 2 to 4 days. Mine can do 4 a day, so I set mine to 15. (So I'm greedy. I've earned it, been running this since it started in May 99 and have crunched a lotta packages)
The "Use Seti Driver" and "Create SETIlog.csv" are season to taste. The .CSV file can be opened in Excel to review Driver's historyfile. Set "Use Seti Spy" to enabled, Spy install and use is covered below.
Another variable is "priority". You might want to set this to 'Normal', but if this slows down everything else you do with your computer too much, you can always set it back to 'Low', which is the commandline version's default.
(Note: When you're not using your computer, Seti has free use of all processing power, and so is running the same speed on 'Low' as at 'High'. Priority only dictates what share of the processing power Seti gets when you're running other programs at the same time.)
This program can be "resored" from the taskbar any time, so you can "unhide processing" if seti stalls inexplicably or whatever, though remember, that just brings up a pretty uninformative DOS box that may have an error message you can check on)

There are several different taskbar icons that Driver uses to keep you informed on its status:
- Driver Versions before 1.6.1.1
- Driver Version 1.6.1.1 and later
Further information about Seti Driver is available in the new "Troubleshooting and FAQ" section.

Now go get the Seti Spy program at the Seti Spy Website or download the program here.

Deposit that file into your Seti directory, too. When Seti Driver is running, and it is configured to send information to Seti Spy, then Seti Spy becomes an extremely cool and informative way of watching the program as it progresses *without reducing its speed*! Just double click on the SetiSpy.exe file and it's running.

The User Stats view keeps you up to date on your overall progress.

You can track the progress of the datablock process at the Progress view.

..Or you can track the data block using the "results" window, and get a visual representation as the red bar moves across the graph, plotting interesting spikes, gaussians, triplets, and you can hit "View Log" to see all the packages that Seti Driver has watched.

You can even see a sky map with the exact location of the data block's origin pinpointed on it, by hitting "Work Unit"... "Sky Map".

Further information about Seti Spy is available in the new "Troubleshooting and FAQ" section.

It might be useful to make desktop icons for Seti Driver and Seti Spy, so you can start them up at will. You might also want to add shortcuts to these programs to your "startup" directory, so they start when your computer does. The one thing to remember is to *not* start the commandline.exe by itself, that would just be a waste of a package, as it would start a whole different session than has been run under Seti Driver. Use Driver to operate your commandline version. And... remember NOT to open a second session of Seti Driver, that's just a headache and stops processing cold. (Alt+Ctrl+Delete and highlighting Seti Driver and hitting "End Task" is the way out of that)