Topic: New to mining, having issues, Mhash dropping with my main rig on Win7 (Read 970 times)

Hi everyone, I am new to mining. I recently set up a new rig because I have some nice hardware I don't want to go to waste. I don't pay electricity at my rental so I figured why not! I have about 3 computers set up around the house which are doing light mining, around maybe 3-1 Mhash/s. But my main computer can get ~50. I'm using the GUI Miner with slush's pool, I've tried the python one but as far as I can tell this does the same thing under the hood.

It was a hot day this weekend and I was actually getting some "hardware failed" errors. I am slightly overclocking my CPU so it could be that there's not enough stability there. However today it is much cooler and I haven't been getting the errors.

What I have been getting though, is that the 50Mhash drops to around 3 if I leave it sitting around and come back. If I restart mining, it goes back up to ~50.

I noticed this performance drop if something is using the CPU at 100%, but when it starts reporting this there is not much load on the CPU. I suppose it could have spiked but it wasn't at 100% at the time when it consistently goes down to 3 Mhash/s.

How can I debug this problem? Are there any known issues with the miner that ships with Guiminer? I updated the binary to the latest one and then rolled back to the one in GuiMiner to make sure I wasn't just having odd issues.

Additionally whether it is GUIMiner or what, is there any client that supports auto recovery? I hate that I have to baby this machine and make sure it hasn't dropped again. It's sad that 3 crappy computers are contributing more than this main rig just due to these issues. Thanks!