Ahoy, all, me be Ahab.

I was literally introduced to bitcoin yesterday by a friend that was planning on paying bitcoins to people who helped him build things in minecraft, but I haven't heard back from him on that.

I originally thought that because of the logarithmic inflation rates that this was one big pump and dump scheme about a year ago, but since there's a strong community, I might as well jump in.

So now I've got an ewallet, guiminer and a mining pool, mineco.in, and I'm figuring out everything for the first time. I was messing around with guiminer and managed to  BSOD, so I figured it was dangerous to go it alone, so here I am.

MHash/J isn't really a problem because I have a solar panel array on my roof. Also, my laptop is a 3 year old mid-line, so it only eats about 90w.

Speccy:
Make/Model
   ASUSTeK X83vB Laptop
Operating System
   MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
CPU
   Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T6400  @ 2.00GHz
   Bus Speed   199.5 MHz
   Rated Bus Speed   798.0 MHz
   Stock Core Speed   2000 MHz
   Stock Bus Speed   200 MHz
RAM
   4.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 399MHz Stock (6-6-6-18)
Graphics
   512MB nVidia GeForce 9300M GS  Driver 275.27
   Bus Interface   PCI Express x1
   ROPs   2
   Shaders   8 unified
   Physical Memory   512 MB
   Virtual Memory   2304 MB
   Bus Width   64 Bit
   Current GPU Clock   OC 666 MHz
   Current Memory Clock   OC 1332 MHz
   Current Shader Clock   OC 533 MHz
Hard Drives
   313GB Western Digital WDC WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0 SATA

Hooray mediocrity!

Anyway the current predicaments I face are cooling because the solar is enough for a clock, laptop, minifridge and a few other things, but not enough for the window rattler, and not knowing how to correctly set stuff in GUIminer.

I add the arguments -v -w256 to the worker running my GPU and the hashrate jumps up to something like 226 GHash/s so obviously I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I also got a BSOD when I tried a suggestion that I run a CUDA worker. Is there a better mine client for laptop GPUs?

So now I'm learning, and my GPU is chugging along at a steady 1 MHash/s, and my CPU worker at 4 MHash/s, but doesn't have any work from the mine pool. Does that mean I can run shares from a different pool on my CPU?

So I have a lot of questions and I'll be researching them studiously, but if anyone prefers to help me I wouldn't say no to answers.

In the end it's something I can run in the background to make a few bucks. I'm currently unemployed, so every penny counts! If I get enough, I might trade it out and play the forex and speculate against bitcoin. My stats teacher said I might have a knack for it. It'd beat having a real job

See you all around.