I've looked around and found a few distributed computing projects that would probably be worthwhile to run.

 

All of these use BOINC, which means you can use them at the same time.

 

1. Einstein@home is a project to detect pulsars by their gravitational waves alone. If it's done, it would be a major achievement.
   
2. LHC@home is another project, by the people at CERN, to test different possibilities for particle orbits in the upcoming Large Hadron Collider. The idea is to find out which ones result in particles hitting the walls of the collider, which would damage it.
   
3. Climateprediction.net is a project to forecast the climate using computer modeling, so that scientists can tweak parameters just to see what happens.
   

 

Anybody have any other ideas?

 

(I was going to use these on the laptop here, but it overheats when they run... going to put it on the desktop)

are many people still using the protein folding software (folding@home) that you set up an SFN group for way back? i think i still have that running on one of my machines at work but cant remember now.