My wife's Mini (Intel 1.66 GHz Core Duo, 512 GB RAM) was getting slower and slower to the point that it was becoming unresponsive. When I could get Activity Monitor to launch, everything looked OK except the amount of free memory which was near zero and massive swap numbers to VM. I decided to stop Folding at Home which took several attempts and restarts to finally kill it (at one point there were 8 instances running instead of the normal 4). Even force quitting it from within Activity Monitor would succeed, but then F@H would mysteriously relaunch. I've finally uninstalled it and the Mini is back to normal operation. I may try a fresh install of F@H in a few days just to see if it will play nicely again (it used to play nicely until about a month ago). Yeah, I know, more RAM is needed and that is on the agenda.

I stopped F@H a while ago for exactly that reason.

It has never had a negative effect on my G4 nor on my current Mini - just the wife's and only recently. Somehow, it got flummoxed on her machine. I'll see if a fresh install will run OK in a few days.

Let us know about the re-install - I stop F@H too , blaming it on the iMac heat problems

It was the F@H client. I reinstalled it this AM and it immediately sucked up all of the available RAM. The previous version did not do that. It'll have to wait until I can upgrade the RAM to 1 GB when I upgrade my Mini to 2 GB - Gotta make a couple of CC payments first.

Here's my experience: F@H will suck up as much RAM as you have available. If you put in more RAM, it'll use up what you put it. YMMV, natch.

It's running OK on my Mini with 1 GB RAM. It clogs up my wife's Mini with 512 MB RAM. The plan is to upgrade my Mini to 2 Gig and then put the current 1 Gig in her Mini. The VM swaps on my Mini are much less than on hers at the moment when F@H is running.

In Activity Monitor, it appears that F@H is using between 160 MB and 180 MB RAM which is about all of the available free RAM on my wife's mini with 512 MB installed. With 1 GB in my Mini, there is still enough unused RAM that F@H has marginal impact.