I've found that I occasionally get a much smaller hash rate than my actual one displaying on the website.  For example, multiminer is reporting 230 - 250 khs, but hashcows has thought I've been 50 - 100 for the last two days.

I really want to keep mining here, so can anyone give me any ideas on why this might be?  Thanks!

I'm trying out mining on the pool, but I'm only getting around 6 Gh/s, while bfgminer is reporting 7.3.  Any thoughts on the cause?  Also, is there stratum support yet?

I was interested in doing something similar, but I'm not sure if it's entirely possible with the software.  What I ended up doing was defining "litecoin" to point to hashco.ws, which is kind of similar to what you want to do.

Now I believe this means that if you want your miner to always point to multipool, that you can't have auto-switch strategies enabled.  Perhaps an awesome addition for a newer version of the software would be to allow activation of coin switching for specific miners:  for example, if you want your GPU to always point to hashco.ws, but you want your asics to jump around to mining the best 256 coin.

Totally a hypothetical situation, and not at all what I would personally do. >_>  currently I'm single-mining hashco.ws and peercoin so that my gpu always points to hashco.ws.

EDIT:  Also, for multipool, you could point to any of their individual pools instead of the multipool, and use multiminer to do the switching on your behalf.  That being said, I wouldn't recommend it: multipool is a PPLNS pool, so pool hopping that doesn't mirror the website's hopping would end you up with a lot of wasted shares.

Well that, indeed, was fast.  Thank you!  One thing that might make the software even better is showing the fan speed.  From what I remember, BFGminer includes fan speed in part of its display, which really helped me keep an eye on intensity arguments.

One other question: on what timescale is the dynamic intensity based off of?  When I turn it on, it seems to drop my 250 hashrate (intensity 13) to about 20, and just idles there.  I may not be waiting long enough, but it piqued my curiosity.  Thanks!

PS, -I 13 was a good suggestion. a 40 khs drop, but the computer is definitely still usable, and GPU seems to be averaging 75 degrees and ~70% fan (from noise guess).

I downloaded the software, and everything is running beautifully for my BFL ASIC.  I'm having some trouble adapting my ATI 7870 to mine at Hashcows, however.

Ideally, I would like to set up the software to run my videocard at an intensity where the computer could still be used.  I have the scrypt arguments set up as found on https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison (-I 18 -w 128 -thread-concurrency 5600), but this causes massive visual lag.  When I turn on the dynamic throttling option on the software, it will start at 290 kh/s, then slowly wind down to 50, then restart both the GPU and the ASIC, repeating the cycle.

My ideal setup would be where the GPU's target temperature is 65-70, with an emergency override at 80 (instead of the defaults).  I would also prefer to not have the fan run at 100% intensity, so as to prolong the fan's life.  When the computer is used, I would like it to throttle, but when it's not I would like it to run at a relatively safe intensity.  Can anyone give any suggestions on how I should proceed?  Thanks!

Mining is a bit of an arms race, and nobody can tell you whether or not you will make money by doing so; there are just far too many variables at play.

If you want to mine a sha-256 coin (bitcoin or the like), you should buy yourself an ASIC miner.  A good place to check on potential returns is here: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/  If you want to mine a scrypt coin (Litecoin or its children), you would need to build yourself a rig with a fair amount of ATI-based video cards (nvidia just don't have the same performance).

There are also CPU-only mining coins, which might be the best way for you to learn about it.  I recommend looking into Primecoin for that.  I just can't recommend you spend over $1000 on mining if you've never done it before.  Maybe get a block eruptor?