Bitcoin Forum

I just installed bitcoin-q and guiminer for the first time. I am connected to "slush" pool.
When I run guiminer it starts with around 4mh/s but after a minute or two drops to 32kh/s. Is this normal?
I am running it on laptop with built in Intel HD Graphics which I know is pathetic but I am curious as to what causes it to drop to 32kh/s after it starts at 4mh/s?

My second question is, I have saved my wallet using bitcoin-qt and wanted to know how often do I have to keep saving wallet. Do I have to do it daily or will it do automatically now that the first time I have saved it?

My guess on the first question is that the laptop is throttling the GPU's performance for some reason -- temperature or power usage perhaps.

The answer to the second question is that bitcoin-qt maintains a pool of 100 addresses. One of these addresses are used every time you send bitcoins or create a new receive addresses. You need to back up your wallet at least every 100 addresses. It is also necessary to back up the wallet after it is encrypted.

Also keep in mind that the wallet only stores the private and public key for your address.  The public key is the addressed when people send you Bitcoins and the private key (which you don't see) is used when you want to send someone Bitcons.  the actual balance is stoed on the public ledger.  So once you back up your wallet, your keys are safe.  So what the last posted stated was that since the Bitcoin-QT creates 100 key pairs when it first creates the wallet, you do not need to save the wallet again unless you import a new key or use more than 100 keys.  If you never use more than 100 keys then you are good to go withthe first back up. 

This forum software is quite buggy. Yesterday I was unable to register and when I tried again it said that you are already registered and automatically assigned me this user name I have.
Then today when I tried to reply it said I have already replied so I should wait 360 seconds. Then when I tried again after 360 seconds, it said I have already posted a reply which is nowhere to be found.
This happened in both Chrome and Firefox so I know this is not browser cache issue.

1. So basically all coins are stored in mining pool? If mining pool goes down, it means all coins are gone?

2. How long does it take to update my stats on mining.bitcoin.cz website? I have been running this guiminer for more than 24 hours now and I saw one message on status bar of program which said something like "Shares: 1 accepted at 9:15PM" but I see that all my stats are 0 on the website.

With your speed 32KH/s you wont find many shares. If stratum difficulty is 1 then you will find share every 1 and half day

And Slush reward diminishes rapidly after few mins - it is best to use countinuous miner sending shares often.

What are some continuous miners?

Anything more than 32Kh/s  :D

Seriously though, you need faster mining hardware.

1. The bitcoins are stored at a bitcoin address which will be there whether or not the pool is running.

2. You cannot mine bitcoins successfully with a hash rate of only 32 kH/s. After mining for a year, you will earn less than 0.000003 BTC. That is lower than the minimum transaction amount and the pool won't even be able to send it to you.