A great tutorial about solo crunching!

I recommend all new members to join first a pool like http://www.grcpool.com .
Pool crunching infos can be found here: http://gridcoin.us/Guides/pool.htm
In a pool you see your work results on daily bases. You can see a lot of information in the pool statistics.
For solo mining you need some thousand gridcoins and a magnitude over 20, to get a billing period below a week.