Thanks for the reply.
Using processing power to secure transactions make sense, but I still don't see why all the biggest datacenters should get the big part of the money.
I was not talking about resuming a mining operation, just how to keep my account and wallet when re-installing or switching computers.
I also won't try GUIMiner again unless I get an answer on that crash. Seems like there's a lot of other applications available, which one should be best for an high-end Intel+Nvidia combo on Windows7 x64?
Right now, there aren't many "big datacenters" because this is a very specific problem and the performance depends on the hardware you use. I can beat 100 PCs that mine with a CPU just by using an ATI 5970. So instead of big datacenters, we have shortage of ATI cards.
To backup your wallet you only need to save the wallet.dat file:
Linux/unix: ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat
Windows: %APPDATA%\Bitcoin\wallet.dat (I think; I don't run Windows)
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/wallet.dat
See
here for more info.
GUIMiner should work... That shutdown is worrying. What is the GPU model?