I'm in love with this pool as well. I've switched over 100% of my resources (and even trying to find new ones!) to this pool - previously was putting the smaller miners on BTC Guild PPS, but BTC Guild really makes me a little queasy with the total lack of community or explanation as to how their main pool maintains ~1.3 THASH/SEC (yeah, 1,300 Ghash/sec) and has NO COMMUNITY WHATSOEVER... no news page, no "FAQ", no information whatsoever, just a well-designed Account info page (which is what got me there), and a very stable rate of pay. Seeing as though I'm making unheard-of amounts of BTC off BitMinter - almost making mining *profitable* - I'm all in! My small handful of decent-powered CPUs almost makes up 2/3 the power of my single 6770 at home
I just have to put in a HUGE request for some features. BitMinter is just... ech. I dunno, unstable? Unusable? I really can't use it at home or anywhere I can think of... it doesn't save ANY information (a huge, huge, HUGE issue I have - my #1 request!), like the number of completed proofs, BTC/day calculation, or even "hiding" undesired devices! If I click "X" on a device, it re-appears the next time the client is opened. I can't just tell my roommate to "hit the big Start button" when the CPU miner is shown on the screen as well. He'd have to pick through and start the two GPUs manually. He rarely does. As a result, his computer still runs 24/7 and doesn't get any mining done. I KNEW he'd forget to start them. I can run Phoenix in a background Remote Desktop session, but that conflicts with his gaming when he does want to use it. I also can't edit clock speed from RDP, thanks to Catalyst (which brands itself Vision Engine due to a conflict of the APU/chipset and the Radeon GPU installed). Can't even get the goddamn PC to run CrossFireX like it was advertised to. What a headache on his PC... even on my server, it's easier to just double-click Phoenix.
So, feature requests, in order of priority...
- Save settings and information between sessions. Completed blocks and hidden devices among the top priority.
- Automatically run when idle. There's a little tool out there on the boards, WhileIdle, that has full source code provided, which does a decent job of detecting idle periods and starting/stopping a program during idle. Downside is, it has absolutely no interface and needs to be killed via Task Manager. Maybe use the source code as a basis for implementing it into BitMinter in Java? That would provide me with an excellent incentive to actually *use* the BitMinter client.
- Pie in the sky, but it'd be nice if BitMinter could set the GPU clock speed automatically as well. When the PC is in use for gaming, the default clock speeds (850MHz core/1200MHz memory) are most efficient. When it's mining, 950MHz core/300MHz memory clock dramatically reduces its power consumption and increases hash speed. I'd be giddy to see just a "set this clock speed" option, not even the auto-management that CGMiner provides (which usually just runs full blast anyway).
- Detect if OpenCL runtime is installed. When I first installed BitMinter on the server, it didn't produce an error, but didn't even detect the 6770 that its GUI was being displayed on - it only showed the CPU! I did some digging and found that the Catalyst installer didn't install OpenCL due to the Server 2008 R2 OS not matching its specification. I manually installed OpenCL via the MSI installer, and it worked fine. That could affect people using older drivers or incomplete installations that simply think their card isn't capable of running BitMinter.
And that would make it Awesome.