Rule 2 of mining gear: CHECK YOUR STATS AT LEAST 3-5X A DAY! I just wanted to see by chance how much bitcoin was generated in my pool acct and I saw that the future expected earnings was decimal tiny. Come to see that my BF full kit has been off for sometime! I have no idea how much mining time I've lost today but I'd imagine its a .29 lost as that is expected twice per day and hasnt arrived but once!
one feature found in some pools (bitminter for example) is a dead worker notification - the pool sends you an email when a worker hash rate falls below a pre-configured value. This can save you lots of time either checking stats or not hashing.
/cet