Folding@Home

This is where you can learn about and join the AndrewSaysHello.com’s Folding@Home Team! I won’t go into writing a book about it and why I think you should join the team… Instead I am going to just dive right into the details on everything so you can join up!

The Quick Info is at the bottom of this page if you already know how to setup the F@H Client and don’t need to read through everything. (though you may still want to look at how to add it to your startup)

About the Folding@Home Project:

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
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. 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.

Click HERE to go to the F@H Project’s homepage.

Downloading and Setting up the client:

You can help 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.

  • Click HERE to go to the download page. The installer is rather small and only weighs in at 2.74MB total.
  • Next you need to install the client. It is rather small and only takes a few minutes to install on your system. Just leave everything default and let the program install into the default location it picks for itself.
  • Once it is done installing, you should see a little icon appear down in your taskbar (near the clock in the bottom right of your screen). 
  • Right click on the Folding@Home icon and click on “Configure”.
  • Choose a username for yourself (so it can keep track of your stats) and for the team number put in “157984” (without the quotes of course).
  • After that you can tab over to the “Advanced” tab and change any settings but I would recommend leaving all of it at the default except for maybe the power option near the bottom if you are running on a laptop.
  • Click “OK” and you should be good to go!

Adding the Folding@Home Client to your computer’s Startup:

First we will give the easiest and most simple way to add the F@H client to your startup.

  • Simply download this .zip FILE, extract the file from the zip file, and double click the folding-startup.reg which will add the client to the startup via the registry. 

 

Now the other way to add the client to your computer’s startup.

  •  First navigate to where the program was installed. (By default it should be C:\Program Files\Folding@home\Folding@home-x86)
  • Right click on the Folding@home.exe file and click on “Create a Shortcut”
  • Now, click on the new shortcut file (don’t let go) and drag the file over the start button. The start menu should open up.
  • Next move your mouse (still holding the shortcut file) over the “All Programs” which should also expand.
  • After that you need to do is find the little folder called “Startup” and drag the  shortcut file over the folder and place it inside with any other programs or shortcuts that may be in that folder. Once you have it in there, you can let go of the mouse and you should see it in the folder now with anything else that was already in the Startup folder.
  • Last you need to reboot your computer, and when Windows comes back up, the “Configure” window might come back up for the F@H client so you may need to double check to make sure all of your settings stuck and didn’t go back to default. (such as your username and the team number)


Quick Info:

Team Name: AndrewSaysHello.com
Team Number: 157984
Team Stats: Click Here

So I hope this was helpful for everyone and I encourage everyone to do this as it does not slow down your computer since it only uses your processing power when it is available to it (aka the computer is idle). If you have any questions or problems please feel free to contact me via the Contact Us page or post in the forums HERE.

By Andrew