thankyou comrades, for the comprehensive and comprehensible answers. Apparently my Nvidia supports CUDA so I'm downloading the latest 64 bit drivers to give it a whirl. Expect screams and falling hair in the not too distant future...

First post. Impressed with the elegance of the concept and the simplicity of implementation. Already punted it to about 50 friends.

Installed a bitcoin node and have been generating since Tuesday. Naturally wondered how long it takes to generate a coin. Went looking and found, according to the online calculator, that it will take about a year at my current rate of 4400 khashes/s - which I've already seen in the forum referred to as "very slow".

Also found refs on the forum to others generating 50 coins a year and using gpus capable of running 60 mhashes/s instead of cpus.

I appreciate that gpus are a faster option, but how would someone - who's never dabbled in that side of computing - exploit the gpus in our own system? I have two graphics cards in my system, an NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT and an ATI Radeon HD 4300 (which is primarily there to speak to my TV so it's available most of the time). Are either suitable?  (or do you have to dedicate a machine explicitly to the task)

And, in any case, is 4400 the kind of rate we'd expect from a modern CPU? It's an I7 quad core 2.8Ghz. Initially I allowed it to use 2 cores only, but the rate was only 2300, so I permitted the other 2 to join in. If it's relevant, I'm running Win 7 Ult and have 12Gb Ram installed.

Oh and one final question. Do the references I've seen to "Mining" mean "generating"?