I'm running 4 different projects on my computer. How to I set the manager so that it processes jobs based upon completion dates. I hate it when there's only 30 minutes left on a job, and manager will switch to aother job that is a week past the completion date of the job that had been running. I'm running XP2

Bob

You don't have to.
BOINC (especially the 5.8 branch) has a scheduler that checks when the deadline of results is and if they are about to miss their deadline, will run that result exclusively.

If BOINC were to crunch on deadline only, it would give problems to other projects when one project you attached to would only have (example given) 2 day deadlines. That project would get the CPU only. So someone clever devised debts.

If you just let BOINC do its thing, you'll find that all projects you are attached to get their equal share in CPU. And once one project which may have been in Earliest Deadline First mode has uploaded and reported, it will no longer download new work, leaving your other projects time to catch up on CPU usage.

Then eventually when everything is equalized, that project will download work again.

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I'm running 4 different projects on my computer. How to I set the manager so that it processes jobs based upon completion dates. I hate it when there's only 30 minutes left on a job, and manager will switch to aother job that is a week past the completion date of the job that had been running. I'm running XP2

Bob

I find it annoying too, but the devs keep pointing out that the completion time and % complete is only an estimate and some project can run for an extremely long time cleaning up after reaching 100% done. Perhaps one day they will give us a 'crunch to completion button', but I'm holding my breath.

What I do is set my switch time to be longer than the run time for the majority of the projects I've attached to. This doesn't guarantee that a WU won't be stopped with 1 second to go, as there are other factors involved, but it does tend to minimize how often it happens.

EDIT: sorry, am I misreading the last line of your post. Different issue!!!
As Ageless said Boinc should be able to schedule things and should not be missing deadlines. That is its primary rule 'DON'T MISS DEADLINE'.

If deadlines are being missed you must either not be giving Boinc enough CPU time or you are micromanaging it. I have 14 projects on my slow AMD system and it never misses a deadline.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470