= Windows Issue =

== Don't compute while movie playing ==

Problem: while a movie is playing there's no mouse/kbd input,
and CPU usage can be low,
so BOINC starts computing, possibly with GPU,
and the playback is messed up.

How does BOINC know if a movie is playing?
This was asked here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1154923/detect-movie-being-played-windows
and the only answer was: make a list of video players,
and see if any of them is running.
That approach has many drawbacks.

Rom thinks there's a Windows API that media players call to tell the system
not to start a screensaver.
If we could read this flag, we could not compute when it's set.

The !SystemParametersInfo() API has some stuff related to screensavers:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms724947%28VS.85%29.aspx
but it seems to be just whether the user has registered a screensaver
(not whether it's eligible to run).

GPU usage tools: http://www.ozone3d.net/gpushark/

== Don't turn on the fan ==

People don't like it when BOINC makes their fan go on high,
especially if it pulses because of CPU throttling.

I think a good default policy would be to limit CPU usage
(by # of cores and/or throttling) to keep from raising the fan speed.
There are many possible policies.
For any of them we need to be able to read the fan(s) speeds.

Some possibly relevant stuff:

ACPI
http://www.acpi.info/

Windows Management Instrumentation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/Dn614028(v=vs.85).aspx

Fan management tools
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php