Most of my mining hardware runs on Linux, but I have a Windows box on my desk at work. I'd rather have minerd running as a daemon, but the Windows binary doesn't provide that as an option. I could launch it minimized with a batch file called by a shortcut, but it still shows up in the taskbar.
A little bit of digging turned up some VBScript that can launch a program invisibly: no window, no taskbar, nothing to indicate it's running other than an entry in the task manager. Some more digging turned up a way to renice the program so it doesn't interfere as much with normal usage.
' launch minerd
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & "C:\Program Files\pooler-cpuminer-2.2.3-win32\minerd.exe" & Chr(34) & " -a scrypt -o http://ltc.kattare.com:9332/ -O username.workername:password", 0
Set WshShell = Nothing
' renice it to idle priority
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colProcesses = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Process Where Name = 'minerd.exe'")
For Each objProcess in colProcesses
objProcess.SetPriority(64)
Next
Change the path to minerd.exe as appropriate. I'm using the burnside Litecoin pool; change the pool URL and authentication options as appropriate. Save as minerd.vbs, add it to the startup group, and it'll run hidden when you log in. If necessary, use the task manager to kill it.
The only downside is that you don't get to monitor mining progress, as logging support isn't implemented in the Windows binary and there's no window to check.
