FWIW, I just started mining a week ago and am still in the "trying different things out before I commit to buying any specialized hardware" phase, so I am not even remotely an expert. I also just started running bminer earlier today - currently at about 7 hours of mining Zcash on Nanopool...

That said, I haven't had any crashes, CPU usage (AMD FX-8300) is around 15% (according to Windows 10 task manager), and I am getting a software-reported hashrate of 190-193 Sols/s with a rinky-dink Zotac GTX 1050 Ti Mini that has been mildly overclocked (see details if interested below) with MSI Afterburner. I will be trying out a couple of other different miners but I want to let this one run for a full 24 hours first. I did run Excavator for about 15 minutes but it was reporting a terrible hashrate of around 100 Sols/s so I didn't investigate it further. I also have EWBF 0.3.4b and Claymore 10.2 to play with, but I likely won't bother with Claymore since the way it does the dev fee mining actually costs you over 1 minute per hour vs. 36 seconds if you aren't mining Ethereum because of the time it takes to change pools, generate the DAG for Ether, etc. Not to go off on a tangent in my own post, but my personal opinion is that dev fees should be paid  in whatever coin is being mined and by switching the payment address.

EDIT: one feature request so far - display the cumulative run time.

MSI Afterburner overclocking details: +86 on the core clock to 1795 (max possible is 1797); +196 on the mem clock to 3700. Lowering TDP resulted in a lower hashrate so no point in doing that while excessively increasing mem clock did nothing but make the card run hotter so it seems that both core and mem clock need to go up together for the most benefit.