I'm not understanding

[Garfield]

Do you guys (Folding guys) install some software so when your cpu is on idle, it runs??? What does the software do???

--Garfield

[Ploaf]

Yes that's exactly what we do.
Here's an answer that I drew up before
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project, the sole purpose of which is to figure out how proteins fold and misfold in the body so that we can come up with medicines/treatments to help prevent diseases that are caused by misfolded proteins. This task requires amazing amounts of computational power. The projects are divided into smaller tasks which are sent out to users on the internet to take advantage of the power of thousands of individual pc's all connected to the internet. The power they derive from this method is greater, although different in function and ability, than most supercomputers and is useful for this sort of task. In this project we allow, in the case of Folding@Home, Stanford University's Pandegroup(the people running the project) to send information that needs to be calculated to our computers. The computer performs the calculation and sends the work back to Stanford where it will then get more work to complete. The results from the project will be released to the public and it is proving useful to IBM, NASA and a few other folks and has received the endorsement of Intel.
We have gathered into a team that competes with other teams to see who can do the most work. The science of the project is serious. The teams and competition are just something to help keep your interest. Hope that helps. If not then more information can be found at http://folding.stanford.edu

[Fightingpiper]

If you need any help downloading, installing or configuring the client jsut ask were here to help.

Cheers!