I have been using BOINC Manager for years, and know about the two ways to stop jobs from being processed.

1) Left click on the taskbar icon, select the "Snooze" option, and jobs pause for one hour. (No option to change this delay.)

2) Select whole projects from the "Projects" tab or specific tasks on the "Tasks" tab and select "Suspend" to halt them from running until they are manually enabled again with the "Resume" button. (No option to automatically Resume after some delay.)

These are fine as very basic controls, and essentially do the same thing but in different ways. But they both could use improvements.

For "Snooze", add a user-updatable time field somewhere like in the settings menu to change the default 60-minute delay to something else (such as: 1 to 999 minutes). I often would like BOINC to be inactive for about 4 hours at a time when I work at home, but then automatically start back up without my intervention. Having to repeatedly hit the snooze every hour or so becomes annoying, especially when having to switch away from whatever active task I am doing at the moment to click on this setting over and over. While simple to click, it becomes a major distraction due to the repetition required.

For the last few months I have been using other applications in full screen mode, so accessing the Snooze control has become more difficult (exit full screen mode, do the clicks to set the snooze, then re-enter full screen mode).

The longer delay would avoid messing with the snooze setting as often, and being able to stay in full screen mode longer. In addition, Ctrl-Tab allows me to select the BOINC Manager app, but there is no Snooze control in the main app to select this feature. It is ONLY available from the Windows task bar. Adding a Snooze control to a menu item (ie: an "Activity" option) would avoid disrupting my full-screen monitor, as the full-screen program runs on my left monitor, but BOINC and other apps run and are accessible on my right monitor at the same time. Finally, the BOINC taskbar icon is not available on my right monitor, so even with full access to the BOINC Manager app, the Snooze control remains buried out of sight. The Snooze control is simply not always as easy to access as many apparently believe it to be.

For the "Suspend" functions, please add a global user updatable time field for how long all suspended jobs will remain inactive. A setting of "0" would be the current default of "active forever", but a new range such as 1 to 999 minutes would then resume all suspensions. Users who setup complex job suspensions manually can continue to do this as they always have with the "0" default setting. But for simple suspensions that should automatically resume (much like the snooze feature) this would allow selected or all tasks to be stopped manually but then restart later without user intervention. I dislike the Suspend function because I often forget to Resume jobs or projects, and the computer ends up sitting idle for long periods with no tasks running at all because I forgot to manually reenable them.

Both of these features seem to do the same thing, but using different approaches. Improving one would likely reduce the need to also improve the other. I am describing what my current operating issues are, so the programmers can evaluate if modifying one would be better than the other (or both). For now, neither approach works that great. But because there are two different approaches available, past requests to make any improvements always seem to be met with "just use the other one instead". Using one method instead of the other does not always solve the problems experienced with both.

Few of the developers frequent these boards. if you go to git-hub and create an account you will be able to request what you suggest or any other ideas you have for improving BOINC. You will also be able to search to see if such a request has been made in the past and if so, whether it is dormant or has been rejected. (For the latter you don't need to create an account.

Added my comments onto this existing conversation for anyone reading along, or who may want to add their own comments as well.

https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/1432