Am I doing this right?

[croaker]

I have a quad core i7 920 cpu overclocked to 3.6 GHz and have been running the bitcoin client for about a years time now.  I definitely don't run my computer 24/7, but I would say I average at least 3 hours per day every day 365 days a year.  The priority of the client is set to high, and the "Generate Bitcoins" thing is enabled as well.

Is this normal?  I'm sure people ask this all the time, but I feel like I must be doing something wrong to have not even generated a single bitcoin so far.

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[IamFuzzles]

Have you looked into GPU mining? Much more efficient. And Pooled GPU mining a further step up.

[taris]

When you already do that a year, than i guess you got lucky some time ago and received some coins.
But now you can stop that, because the GPU-miner totally took over the field - you need your Mhash/s ratio at least above 100 to make some coins with poolmining

You can take a look at some hardware specs here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

[dr.bitcoin]

CPU mining is a complete waste of time. GPU mining will be a waste of time soon, unless you have tens or hundreds of high-end cards. ASIC is the future, but we're not there yet 

[zurzon]

CPU mining is a complete waste of time. GPU mining will be a waste of time soon, unless you have tens or hundreds of high-end cards. ASIC is the future, but we're not there yet 

Application-Specific Integrated Circuit