Over half a year ago I blogged that I joined the grid. And to be honest after a while I stopped because it took quite a toll on my laptop's resources.
But lately I have changed my settings to keep the system cooler and more responsive and continue to crunch those numbers :) It helped quite a bit that I set BOINC to use max. 60% of CPU's/cores and even then max. 60% of each. Also if I'm on battery, my system stops the /etc/init.d/boinc daemon. This keeps my CPU most of the time below 70°C and keeps the system responsive enough for everyday use. Since occasionally I still get some hiccups, I may tweak the settings even more and try some other I/O schedulers in kernel. I hope the new changes in CFS will take care of those, otherwise I may look into BFS.
Apart from crunching for the World Community Grid, I've started contributing my resources to projects on EDGeS@Home, MalariaControl.net and ABC@Home as well. (For some time I tried to contribute to ClimatePrediction.net, but their problems are too big resource hogs for my taste.) So right now my computer helps find solutions for many serious deseases like AIDS, cancer, malaria, muscular dystrophy; patient readmission; clear water; clear energy; fusion reactors; proteins; lasers; the very basics of math etc.
Also I grew tired of crunching alone, so I joined BOINC Synergy. I looked for any other team that I would find more fitting, but couldn't find any. And now for some completely adolescent showing off of statistics in images:
an awesome signature for the WCG forums, that SNURK made
one of the default signatures that you get when you join BOINC Synergy
hook out → crunching numbers and studying laws :D