It's a dell 4 months out of warranty

It has a separate ATI graphics chip, HD7730M, definitely not on chip

All I know is that the GPU is onboard, not seperate like some higher spec laptops, whatever it is that is gone, it prevents the laptop from starting, no post, no fan, nothing

Yeah, unfortunately I really was not aware of how much of a load this can put on it

Maybe if I ever raise the cash I will do it properly next time with ATI cards in a desktop

Hey all, before I start, please please no "I told you so" and "Stupid noob" comments, don't flame me!!

So, about 2 months ago I decided I was going to try my luck at solo mining some coins after reading a lot about them. As I have little cash I decided to use my lowly laptop to mine lower difficulty coins, seeing as I had no chance with the likes of LTC and BTC.

All was going well until a couple of days ago when my laptop started hanging and freezing. I thought it was just the usual adaptor stopped responding as the temps were good according to CGWatcher.

Unfortunately I failed to heed the warnings my laptop was desperately trying to give me. I left it happily (or so I thought) mining overnight and came down in the morning only to find a blank screen, a strange smell in the air and essentially a non working laptop.

I can only presume that the graphics card has given up the ghost which unfortunately has put an end to my solo mining career. I really don't have the cash to buy any rigs/laptops/desktops etc.

The purpose of my message is simply to warn others if using a laptop that you COULD put your hardware at risk and kill your GPU if mining. Unfortunately this is also my works laptop so unless a miracle happens I will not be able to replace it.

Remember, if mining on hardware that is likely to be pushed, especially a laptop just beware as it seems it does in fact cause damage if you are unlucky.

Still 100% stale, either something is wrong with my setup or there is a problem with the coin, can anyone shed any light on this?

Nothing but stales from this coin now, was doing well with it but now I am not

Any problems known of?

All sorted, unfortunately had to do a full system restore

Yup, tried that, no luck, it seems it's a problem with emerald for some reason, every other wallet I try works. It stopped working yesterday morning. cgminer just will not work with it. Sometimes it reports it cannot access the API, I have no idea how to sort that, tried what I have found online in a config file but still no luck

Ok, after lots and lots of fiddling around I still have not managed to get CGminer working with Emerald wallet, everything else I have tried works, Alphacoin, Litecoin, BBQCoin etc etc. Can anyone shed some light as to what is going on please?

Don't know if anyone can help me out but for some reason mining for Emerald will not work any more. No matter what I try, sgminer, cgminer it will not initialise mining. Wallet is up to date, uninstalled and reinstalled everything multiple times but to no avail.

My conf file -


and my cgminer parameters -


If someone could help out I would be most grateful.

You have a PM

If anyone like me was struggling to figure out solo mining DRK then the following is a rough guide using Windows and sgminer -

Example Darkcoin.conf file for solo -

rpcuser=username
rpcpassword=password
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=1234
gen=0
server=1
addnode=23.23.186.131
addnode=50.16.206.102
addnode=50.19.116.123
addnode=98.165.130.67
addnode=54.242.50.205
addnode=50.17.98.53
addnode=54.225.43.37

Example settings for sgminer -

sgminer.exe --kernel darkcoin -o http://127.0.0.1:1234 -u -p --no-adl -I 11 -g 2 -w 64 --shaders 512

These settings are for my graphics card which is a rubbish ATI Radeon HD7730 - I get on average 250-300 Kh/s with this setup so change the graphics settings on the end to suit your card.

Use https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison if you do not know the settings your card should use.

I apologise if this has already been posted but 193 pages of posts is a lot to check through . Just trying to help out.

Well I know my speed is slow but I managed to mine 45 Emerald yesterday, from what I can tell DRK coin is similar difficulty at the moment and I realise over time it will get harder. I didn't really want to get into the whole "solo mining is too difficult" argument, I do realise that it is much harder to solo mine, I just wanted to see if it was possible to configure sgminer to do it?

I am not sure what you mean? I know it's slow but I still have some success, also with other coins

I have successfully mined Emerald solo and was hoping DRK was something of similar difficulty that I could try, I know I would be against pools as is the case with any coin but is there something that makes DRK harder to mine than similar difficulty coins?

Thank you for that, sorry for the newbie questions, only started looking into this a week ago. Still haven't found confirmation of being able to mine DRK solo though, is it possible or not?

By the way I am hashing at about 298 kh/s

All I get from mining that with sgminer is "Stratum from (null) requested work restart" every 2 seconds or so, is this normal?

Ok, after doing a bit more research there seems to be no information on which port to use to solo mine DRK so I am guessing it is not possible, could someone confirm/deny this please?