N00b guiminer questions

[DonC.]

Hi Guys,

Im fairly new to all this and have a couple questions.

1) Bit of a stupid question, Im currently running guiminer solo mining and just wanted to confirm that it was ok to restart machine? It wont lose any progress I've made so far?

2)I've been running it in the background for the past 5 days and currently have 32700 hashes on difficulty 1.
  Should I keep going or join a pool? (If so, which pool?)

3) What decides the completion of mining?

Thanks

Don

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[322i0n]

Join a pool.

Finding a block is like winning the lottery you have to scratch a lot of cards to find the winning ticket.  A pool share ticket scratching and the winnings.

Gui miner has configured some pool settings for you. start of with deepbit.net on PPS payout you will see BTC's within minutes.
then you can try out all the other pools till you find one that suits you.

[armaman]

you won't make anything if you don't join a pool.

joining a pool:

for instance:

goto btcguild.com

1. create account/password

2. create a miner/password

3. in guiminer select btcguild from the dropdown box, input "accountname_minername" and "minerpassword"

4. make sure port is set to 8332

5. hit go (also lookup flags and learn about those, they are settings you can adjust for your specific machine to optimize it)

profit!