Solo Mining Stats Question

Ok, been mining for a few weeks with pools, and I want to try my luck with solo mining. I know this can be a long and fruitless process.

My question is, how can you follow stats when mining solo? On pools, you have shares, and they tell you when a block is found. How is this accomplished solo?

I have been using batch files, but am now using guiminer.

Since starting it up solo, its just told me the Mhash/s, Difficulty 1 hashes: 0

So, can I find out the equivalent of how many 'shares' I have? I know that's a pooling term, but I figure, for example, if it takes 1,000,000 'shares' on a pool, I should be able to see where I'm at in terms of meeting the equivalent solo mining...

Also, how do I know when I've solved a block? Do I just need to wait until coins show up in my Client or what??

Does this make sense?!?

Edit: also, if I stop my miner for a few hours, then start again, does that essentially 'reset' the clock? I know its not all about time, mostly luck, but I'm not sure about how this works when stopping/starting miners when working solo...

Should I stop using guiminer and go back to batch files? I also read it had some issues, not sure if that was only for pool mining though.

Thanks for any input or comments!