Noob here, a couple of questions regarding pool mining & GUIMiner

[worker79]

Hey folks, so I've been reading about bitcoin mining for a while and decided to test the waters yesterday.  Basically I don't have a great card nor do I figure I will make any money using my gear so I joined a pool just to check it out, see what it's like, and if I get my head around it and enjoy it I'll probably go out and buy 1-2 better GPUs.

So, that being said, I have a couple of questions.  First, I'm using an nVidia 9800GT 1GB (I know right - pretty much the worst card out there from what I've read, but I'm just messing around right now).  So, I'm using GUIMiner and want to try limiting my card further to keep temps down.  I've tried adding "-s0.01" to the "extra flags" area, but when I do that it just fails to start.  After I click "Start Mining" the status area that normally shows hash/s just says "Starting..."  and never actually starts.  Is there something else I can try?

Next, I'm in slush's pool and everything on the site is updating OK for me, but I wanted to ask how long it takes for "Unconfirmed Rewards" to be "confirmed".  I have my send threshold set to .01 and in the last 20 hour or so since I started running I've accumulated .0092, so does that mean when it hits .01 it will be "confirmed"?

Thanks for the info folks, please remember that I'm not doing this for profit, just kind of looking at it as a little hobby/experiment for now and who knows, in the future I might invest a little money and see where it goes.  Have a good one!

[Sohcahtoa]

If running your GPU at max capacity is causing it to overheat and you're not overclocking it, then you have a problem.  Either there's too much dust in the fan, you have a poorly designed case, you have another card too close to your video card so it has no room to move air, or something.  It'll get a little warm, sure, but a busy GPU should not be causing heat problems on its own.

I'm not sure when "unconfirmed" becomes "confirmed."  Right now, I've got 0.078 confirmed, and 0.022 unconfirmed.  Just give the pool some time and it'll confirm it and you'll be sent the reward.

[worker79]

Thanks for getting back to me. 

It's not that my GPU is over-heating per-se, it's just really warm (as in the same temps I see if I'm playing a graphically-intense game for 3-4 hours).  Since I'm not doing this for profit right now, I'd just like to scale it back a little bit so I'm not maxing it out 24/7 with my miner running.  It's nowhere close to max temp, but I don't want the miner to affect the life-span of my card since this is my day-to-day PC and not a dedicated mining rig.  I'm really not too concerned about it for now, I was just confused about why the "-s" flag wasn't working.

As for the unconfirmed/confirmed, I just hit my first payout threshold so I guess I'll just wait and see how long it takes.  I have it set up so I should get an email when the transfer is made, I have my wallet open so I guess it will just show up in there.

Thanks again and have a good one!