The number of processes running is a bit of a redherring. The OS is Server 2008 64 bit so there are more processes running than an XP machine plus I have some software that required a hard ware dongle to work. Currently I have 5 different dongles plugged in cause I am too lazy to pull them out all the time. A better measurement is the amount of Ram in use....you can see that my ram use is fairly low (but I am running 16 GB or ram). The program I was running was not Folding@home (sorry Zeus!). I was running DNA by AccessData. DNA is a distrubutted network attack program for cracking passwords. You install the software on the Master/Server machine and then install the client on all your workstations. If any of the workstations are idle it fires them up to work on a piece of the puzzle to crack the password. This particular password was and Adobe Acrobat PDF with a password on it. It took 3 days to get the 9 digit password. As a side note here are some of the numbers for the different machines -
MacPro running Windows 2008 Server with a pair of 3.2 Ghz Xeon quad core CPus hits around 400,000
passwords per minute
Dell 2850 Server running Win2K3 with a pair of dual core 3.2 Xeons hits around 35,000
No name Pentium 4 running XP hits around 18,000
Old AMD XP1800+ hits around 8,000 (not worth the power it consumes)
