This may sound trivial, but I was stuck for days on beginner's puzzle #16 because I was impatient with the working of the alignment tool. I don't recall being warned that the tool would display "working" for quite a while, then "accept alignment" if it was happy, and finally the score might increase still later. A hint to the beginner to be patient with the alignment tool's machinations might be helpful.
Yes, sometimes you get the feeling that the PC is frozen (especially on slower machines), when aligning is performed.
Yes, I should have mentioned I'm working off an 8-year old PC clone desktop running Windows XP Pro. I'm actually in the process of replacing it today, partly to give me decent performance here ;-)
Another glitch that held me up for a week was the old video card, where the game basically didn't run at all. Eventually I found the suggestion (and instructions) buried deep in the fold.it site to dial hardware acceleration on the video back to "only basic H/W accelerations" and I was able to see the real game for the first time. It is possible the site is losing some players before they start due to these small speed bumps.
As you are talkign about hardware:
I still couldn't find any minimum or recommended hardware requirements so far.
Minimum is 2 core and at least 1GB of ram to use 1 client :)
In intros there is "wait until it finish" so marking as resolved.
Thanks for resolving this and undertaking the generally thankless task of resolving a whole lot of stale issues – John McLeod, aka "gramps"