Thanks for the replies again, I've been switching between the official pools, hashparty and easyhash, keeping an eye to see who finds the blocks.

What does my machine do while there are no blocks, it still seems to be hashing something according to the miner outputs.

Also, can someone explain the difficulty when joining pools please, is it a good thing to join using the higher difficulty port, do you get more reward if you do?

Is there a guide somewhere to answer all these questions, would be useful for engineer type people like myself, who like to know how things work behind the scenes