Legit Reviews

What is Folding?
Folding at Home is a distributed client program, similar to SETI, in that it uses your free CPU cycles to help understand how proteins are assembled, or folded. The project is put on by Stanford University whose goal is to find out how proteins assemble themselves and why they sometime misfold. This misfolding is related to many serious diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

By donating your spare CPU cycles to the Folding team you are pitching in to help find out how this process works and eventually to find a cure. Not only will you be doing a good deed for humanity but you will enjoy participating in our team and promoting the healthy competition among team members to produce the most work units of our group.

How Do I Start?
First you will need to go to the Stanford Folding site and download the latest client. Their are three primary downloads for the PC which include: Graphical Client, Graphical Client (screensaver only), and the command line version. There are also downloads for Linux and the Mac OS X.

After downloading any of the above clients, simply run the program and enter a desired user name and our team number (38296). You may choose to scale down the % of the CPU used, for example 85% if you use your computer throughout the day. The default setting will run at 100% (If you run Hyper-Threading it will only run 50% when set at 100%)

Legit Folding Team Info & URL's

Folding Team Number: 38296
F@H site: http://folding.stanford.edu
Official F@H support site: http://www.folding-community.org
The folding educational project page for teachers and students. http://folding.stanford.edu/education
Stats can be checked at the Stanford site listed above or at http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/
Folding Server Status: http://folding.stanford.edu/serverstat.html
Legit Folding Team Page: Legit Folding

One of the diseases that this project is helping to cure is alzheimer's disease, which is a horrible, horrible disease that my grandfather died of just two years ago. Here are some stats on it:

An estimated 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease. The number of Americans with Alzheimer’s has more than doubled since 1980.

In a Gallup poll commissioned by the Alzheimer’s Association,
1 in 10 Americans said that they had a family member with Alzheimer’s and 1 in 3 knew someone with the disease.

National direct and indirect annual costs of caring for individuals with Alzheimer’s disease are at least $100 billion, according to estimates used by the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging.

Alzheimer’s disease costs American business $61 billion a year, according to a report commissioned by the Alzheimer’s Association. Of that figure, $24.6 billion covers Alzheimer health care and $36.5 billion covers costs related to caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer’s, including lost productivity, absenteeism and worker replacement.

Half of all nursing home residents have Alzheimer’s disease or a related disorder.

The average cost for nursing home care is $42,000 per year but can exceed $70,000 per year in some areas of the country.

http://www.alz.org/AboutAD/statistics.asp

I don't have much money, but this is one way that I feel like I am doing something for the common good, and it isn't costing me any time, effort, or money.

Besides that, [H]ardOCP is in 2nd place!! We have a lot of ground to cover to catch them!

Topic Updated due to the fact that the Stats page link does not work.