Well...  Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it, I honestly have to say that...

                              I'M A DUMBASS!!

There, I said it...  

I just feel like such an idiot for procrastinating for as long as I did before ditching that stupid MinerGate and using some mining software that actually WORKS!  I think part of it was I was just psyching myself out earlier in the week thinking that it was going to be this long, involved process installing and setting up another miner software package on my computer and getting it to work with a new mining pool.  But it just...  wasn't!  It was actually so much easier to download and run the command-line miner than MinerGate, it is kind of embarrassing.

Well anyways, moving on then...


So, what did I end up doing then you may ask?  So, I basically flipped a coin and it came up heads, so I went with Alpereum for a mining pool.  (0.0% Pool Fees was actually pretty attractive too, I have to admit...)  They are an anonymous mining pool too, so there was no account to create before I could start mining there or anything.  (You just use your wallet address you are going to use to receive your payouts as your "account name" when you configure the miner software to point at the pool.)

Then the next step was to pick the miner software to use.  Again, I kind of flipped a coin on this one and it came up tails this time, so I went with the Genoil ETHMiner.  (The Alpereum Pool even has a link to their own "flavor" of the Genoil ETHMiner right in their Help Center.)  Once I downloaded the ZIP file, there was nothing to even install.  It is just an EXEcutable with a few .DLL libraries and that's it.  I mean it was just stupid how easy it was to get running.  I just created a .BAT file in the directory to call ethminer.exe with the correct options to get it to mine to the Alpereum Pool and that was it - I'm up and mining!  

For reference, here is the command line statement I used to call ETHMiner:

So far, it seems that I am getting around 25-26MH/s on average with ETHMiner now...    That's MUCH better than the meager 8.87MH/s I was getting from stupid MinerGate!  Now I will have to see what kind of payouts I can get with that hashrate from the Alpereum Pool...  Hopefully better than only $6 for an entire week of mining!  lol...



So, MinerGate is now officially uninstalled and permanently deleted from my computer and I'm not looking back!  I just hope they will let me transfer my paltry 0.03004086 ETH to my other wallet and then close my account down with them.


Thanks again to everyone for their help in pointing me in the right direction!