Topic: New to the crypto mining game (Read 555 times)

Hello guys,

as the title says i'm totally new to this whole crypto game. Ive been doing a lot of research on how it all works, lots of awesome info on this forum, and just wanna say thanks to everyone for sharing their knowledge and experiences.

I have been trying to mine doge coin and quark coin, i'm just on a i5 laptop (trying to get a feel for this whole thing first), and i've encountered a few problems i was hoping i could get some help with.

with mining quark coin i've set myself up with minerd and i'm mining with the forkpool, pool, which from what i can gather pays directly into my quark wallet as i had too put the address in the .bat file. Is this correct?

the other questions about quark is if my above conclusion is correct, in how much should i expect to actually starting seeing them in my quark wallet? currently in the minerd program i'm finding block every couple of seconds and getting lots and lots of 'YAY' next to the lines, is this correct?. Now as i write this i am now getting an error saying something like, submit upstream data stratum error, retry in 30 sec's, any idea what that is? and of course now that i have finished writing this it has gone away.

now with doge coin i have signed up with fast pool. i had it working and only found very few block and got only 2 'yay' and 2 'booo'. when i signed into the pool webpage it should my miner as active and the dash board was showing all the read out of has rates and what not.
i shut it down and then restarted it a few hours later and now the mining pool webpage shows the miner as inactive and no reading on the dashboard page. any ideas would be great too.

thanks in advanced guys, hope it easy enough to make sense of my questions.

regards