Just bumping this because it got moved and buried. Hope that's ok...

I'm new to mining, both BTC and LTC, and I want to focus on LTC on my Mac Pro. My setup is a 2010 Mac Pro Westmere 3.2Ghz Quad-Core Intel Zeon, 8GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5770.

I'm currently seeing average HR of 60-70kH/s while still keeping the computer usable for other things. Cranking it up I can get 120kH/s but the system slows to a crawl and I'm worried about burning something out.

So keeping in mind that I'm also not exactly technically advanced when it comes to hardware, and that my comfort level with tinkering around in the box would max out with doing things like swapping a GPU or adding RAM, what would you suggest I do to upgrade my system to get better hash rates?

Would a simple GPU upgrade help? Anyone know what my options are with this Mac?

Man if only you had tried doing this 6 months ago, just think about what that million would be today.

A year and a half ago I said similar things. BTC is daunting, intimidating, complicated, and all for what, some digital currency that is worth $9 per coin?

Oh if only I'd have taken it seriously back then...

And what about a year and a half from now? Who knows where it will be.

What I've noticed in the short time that I've taken to crypto currencies is that there are a lot of people sharing their doom-and-gloom predictions and disappointing experiences, but it's mostly from people who I think have unrealistic expectations for what this all is. I'm reminded of the guy who sold off his LTC farm and coins just weeks before the price shot up. He blogged about "making a living" mining LTC. This isn't a quit-your-day-job sort of deal. This is a long-term experiment. It seems to me like the folks who end up quitting have very different (and often unrealistic) ideas about what BTC and other currencies should be today.

My first network sync with Litecoin-Qt has been running for over 24 hours now and is about 1/4 of the way done. Is this normal? Should it really take a few days to sync?

And once it's done, does it take this long for every sync after?

As someone late to the coin game, I'm focusing almost entirely on LTC. At this point it just seems too difficult to get into BTC mining. Today it's still barely feasible for me to invest in some good gear, but at the rate of difficulty increase, that gear will be worthless in less than a year.

There can be more than one big coin in the future. I don't think there will be as many as there are currently out there today, but BTC and LTC should be major players for a long time.

It's worked before in other commodities. Gold and silver, for instance, are in the same category of investments, have been around a long time, and people buy both.