NOTES
Let prime95.exe run at all times. It runs at the lowest possible priority,
making use of all your idle CPU cycles.
It should not interfere with your normal work. Let the program run overnight and on weekends. Never turn your computer off. Turn off your monitor to conserve
energy.
NOTE: Running your computer non-stop could increase
your electric bill by $30 per year or more.
It can take many CPU days to test a large Mersenne
number. This program can be safely
interrupted by using the ESC key to write intermediate results to disk. This program also saves intermediate results
to disk every 30 minutes in case there is a power failure.
To fully utilize a dual processor machine, you must
run two copies of prime95.exe. Run one
copy of prime95 as described above. Run
the second copy of prime95.exe with the -A1 command line argument. Make sure the second copy also has the
"Start at Bootup" option set.
Dual processor machines can also improve performance
by setting processor affinity in Windows NT.
Use the Advanced/Affinity dialog box to do this.
You can compare your computer's speed with other users
by checking the site http://www.mersenne.org/bench.htm. If you are much slower than comparable
machines, there are several utilities available (such as TaskInfo2002, http://www.iarsn.com/) that can find programs that
are stealing prime95's CPU cycles.
You can get a report of your PrimeNet server account
status on the web (http://mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml). Type your UserID and
password into the web form, and click "Get Account Report". You can get your UserID and password from
the Test/User Information dialog box.
Information about running a local PrimeNet server is
also available. See http://mersenne.org/primenet/status.shtml. If you have any questions about the PrimeNet
server, you can send e-mail to primenet@mersenne.org.
The first time you run this program it will perform an
hour long self-test to make sure the Lucas-Lehmer
code is running properly on your system.
If this self-test is interrupted, the full self-test will be run when
you restart prime95.
If you have overclocked your machine, I recommend
running the torture test for a couple of days.
The longer you run the torture test
the greater the chance that you will uncover an error
caused by overheating.
Depending on the exponent being tested, the program
may decide that it would be wise to invest some time checking for small factors
before
running a Lucas-Lehmer
test. Furthermore, the program may
start factoring exponents before a previous Lucas-Lehmer test completes. This is normal! The program will resume the
Lucas-Lehmer test when the factoring completes.
You can configure this program to have different
properties at different times of the day and/or to not run during certain times
of the day.
Unfortunately, you must manual edit the prime.ini
file. Let's say you want to install the
program on a friend's machine and he runs a screen saver at night. He also runs a disk defragmenter at midnight
on weekdays. This prime.ini file will run the program at a higher priority than
his screen saver at night and on weekends.
It also sleeps for an hour when his defragmenter starts running. Finally, at night fewer save files are
generated to allow his disk to stay powered down longer.
UserID=foo
Other
prime.ini entries
Time=1-5/8:30-17:30
Priority=1
DiskWriteTime=30
Time=1-5/1:00-8:30,1-5/17:30-24:00,6-7/0:00-24:00
Priority=5
DiskWriteTime=240
The 1-5 refers to days of the week, with Monday=1 and Sunday=7. The time portion refers to the hours of the
day based on a 24-hour clock. You do not need to specify days of the week (e.g.
Time=1-7/0:00-8:00 is the same as Time=0:00-8:00). Unpredictable results will occur if there are overlapping time
intervals. Also note that any options
that appear in the Time= sections should not appear earlier in the prime.ini file and you can no longer edit these options
from the user interface.