Hello all, I've been scouring the interwebs the past few weeks trying to get my computer setup in the most stable way for Bitcoin mining. This is what I've found out and I hope it helps new people get started with mining
1. What you Need
In order to actually mine, you need a competeant graphics card. The preferred ones the AMD cards as they have significanly higher hashrates than the nVidia cards. in terms of software, you need a wallet. The wallet I use is Bitcoin-qt, which can be downloaded from http://bitcoin.org/en/ - the main Bitcoin website. It will take several hours to download all the data so you might want to leave it overnight.
The second crutial piece of software you need is a miner. I know Rytak has suggested GUIMiner, but I recommend CGMiner as it is much more flexible and stable. You can find CGMiner here: http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/. In addition to those two, I have found the little application called CGWatcher to be very helpful. It essentially monitors CGMiner and can be scheduled to turn off CGMiner at various times, restart every so hours, etc. Find it here: http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgwatcher.html
2. Setting it all Up
Once you have downloaded your wallet and the CGMiner, you need to configure CGMiner so that it mines and sends the data to the pool or whatever. On the CGWatcher page, there is a pastebin with the text that needs to be in the cgminer.conf file you need. Copy what is in here http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=CEz1Vgvn into a text editor like notepad, and save it with the .conf extension. Put that file in the same directory as cgminer.exe. When you edit the conf file, there is a place at the top that allows you to specify the server/host and port, the worker name, and the password for the worker.
Now, CGMiner is setup to your pool and communicate with CGWatcher. When you run CGWatcher, you should get a clean interface with tabs on the top. The UI is pretty self explanitory.
3. Fin
Well, that's about it for basic miner setup and failsafe just in case the miner stops for some reason, Hope this helps! Cheerio!
Links:
CGMiner: http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/
CGWatcher: http://manotechnology.blogspot.com/p/cgwatcher.html
code for the cgminer.conf file: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=CEz1Vgvn