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During the day, usually I'm away from my computer for 3-5 hours. I also sleep 6+ hours every night.

I run Arch Linux x64 on my computer.

Besides the usual things that do not require user intervention (torrenting, backing up data, upgrading the system, etc...), is there anything useful that I can let my computer do while I'm away?

Considering I almost never turn the computer off, it seems like a waste it's sitting there doing nothing. I'm looking for any kind of suggestion, not only machine maintenance.

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Why not just let it idle and save on your energy bill? –  eldering Aug 30 '13 at 16:44
@eldering, if you're looking to save energy, why would you even leave the machine on? –  ForeverWintr Aug 30 '13 at 18:04
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marked as duplicate by techie007, slhck Aug 30 '13 at 18:36


3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Yes, there is. There are quite a few projects that use idle computers for scientific research, the most famous (at least the ones I know) are:

  • SETI@home:


  • Folding@home:



If you're only interested in administrative tasks, you could lso consider running things like updatedb to refresh locate's database.

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I was half way through writing the same thing. :) –  ForeverWintr Aug 30 '13 at 16:07
just remember, your computer will be doing work running these, often maxing CPU usage. More work = more electricity and heat. More electricity and heat = more $. –  Keltari Aug 30 '13 at 17:05
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Wikipedia has a list of distributed computing projects that you could contribute to.

You could also "mine" bitcoin, although I'm not sure how much money you'd net after paying for electricity.

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I personally think this is a beautiful question.

I myself run Folding@home some nights on my machine, although I have a very old PC. If you have a good set of hardware equipments, you might want to try it too. It is basically a distributed computing project, trying to find cures for some kinds of cancers.

I found them one night, when I was thinking about: "Would we be able to build the strongest supercomputer in the world, by uniting all the seemingly small PCs and smartphones, and then let the users use this power on a shared basis. Like when you want to do some processing and need a powerful CPU, well, you can use this huge network of CPUs." Then I googled for "Shared computing", and I was directed to this Wikipedia article. In there you can find a huge list of such projects that you could and might possibly want to devote your computing power to.

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