Initially, I used GUIminer, which doesn't really need any settings. When that failed, I followed the instructions on each pool's site. So I copy-pasted this for Reddit, and when that failed too, I just changed the url, port, username and password on the command line parameters to fit the rest of the pools, keeping everything else the same.

That's the error I get every time I try to use a miner to mine. (Or something similar) I've tried poclbm, phoenix, diablo etc, as well as 3 different pools, following the isntructions for each. The Bitcoin client has finished downloading the blocks, and the bitfaucet transfer was completed succesfully. My laptop has:

Windows Vista SP1
AMD Turion Dual-core 2.20 GHz
2 GB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 4500