Howto setup minig for a windows machine, then exhange to euros

[Bas Koning]

A thing I have been wondering is:

Howto setup one of my machines (windows 7, geforce 9600 GT) to mine some small coin when I sleep.

That would be awesome.
 
Then, how can I extract those coins, exchange them into euros, and buy groceries 

I would like to post a small manual about that on youtube to get more people involved: lots of greedy people will mine for a dime. (including myself, hehe)

[UrbanAdventurer]

download the bitcoin client, download guiminer, pick and register at a pool, then setup an account at tradehill. 

[322i0n]

You can also trade BTC for euro at intersango.eu.

[PLaci1982]

9600 GT

Buy a new ATI GPU

[Bas Koning]

9600 GT

Buy a new ATI GPU

Yeah, I know, its just an oldie gathering dust in a corner. 
 
How much hashes does it take to mine a single coin (or euro) anyway? Very roughly estimated?

[nmat]

It should take about 2 weeks (if you are running 24/7) to make 0.1 bitcoins (~1 euro). You will spend a lot more than that in electricity though.

[Sepp]

It should take about 2 weeks (if you are running 24/7) to make 0.1 bitcoins (~1 euro). You will spend a lot more than that in electricity though.

Sounds like a bad deal to me 

[Bas Koning]

-Create wallet with http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/bitcoin/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.24/bitcoin-0.3.24-win32-setup.exe: Done
-Register an account with http://mining.bitcoin.cz/accounts/register/: Done
-Also, register a worker there (since it appears one has to register each GPU individually): Done

-Install gui-miner (for 64bit) http://cloud.github.com/downloads/Kiv/poclbm/guiminer-20110501.exe:  Done
Now, the GPU I have did not show up in gui-miner, instead it gave me some feedback about openCL, so I installed http://developer.amd.com/sdks/AMDAPPSDK/Pages/default.aspx, restarted gui-miner, and there it was: my trusty old GeForce 9600GT, showing up just fine.

-Filled in credentials in the miner, pressed 'start mining':
It would not connect: 'starting' or 'connecting', then: nothing moves for half an hour.

Added 'summary' and 'console' to the view.

Summary seems to hang on the message 'connecting'. The console gave some clue, though:

Code:

Wrong platform or more than one OpenCL platforms found, use --platform to select one of the following
[0]	NVIDIA CUDA
[1]	AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing

So I tried with this flag:

Code:

--platform 1

Restarting mining now did not raise any warnings or errors in the console.
Checking the summary shows I am currently adding 3.2Mhash/s to the pool

But: after a while: 'verification failed! check hardware!' Oops:
tried

Code:

--platform 0

instead.

Restarting mining now did not raise any warnings or errors in the console.
Checking the summary shows I am currently fluctuating between 13 and 13.3Mhash/s.
Few seconds later: 1 share accepted.

Checked my account on http://mining.bitcoin.cz/accounts/profile/, estimated BTC reward for current round:
0.00030305 BTC
 
 

Where is a list of all the flag options?

[deepceleron]

That video card is not awesome, but you should be able to get a bit more mhash out of it.

I would install the latest nVidia driver 275.xx for the best OpenCL support.

The most productive nVidia miner is guiminer 6-14-2011, later versions are more ATI-optimized.

And then get nVidia system tools and overclock that thing until it catches on fire!

[Bas Koning]

install the latest nVidia driver 275.xx:
17.3 MHash/s, wow! That helped a lot   (I did have very old drivers)

Downgrading the gui-miner to 6-14-2011:
Did not help a lot: Unchanged at 17.3 MHash/s

I am a little afraid to overclock it to death... What variables are relatively safe to fiddle with, you think?
 
Any place where I can find all the possible flags? Could tinkering with those flags increase Mhash/s somehow?

(edit)
I also created a worker for my CPU, just for fun, the 6-14 version lets me select cpu-affinity, as long as I keep one processor focused on GPU, rest on CPU I get
17.3 MHash/s (GPU) +
2.5 MHash/s (CPU) =
19.8 MHash/s (total)