Thanks, thats just what I wanted!

Go to Help -> Debug Window and select the "Console" tab.  type "getmininginfo" and press enter, that will tell you your hashes per minute, the current difficulty, the block number etc

That's the easiest way to start mining but its not very efficient, there are several pools that seem to work more or less, they are all new and still have bugs through. 

Mining isn't an area of expertise for me, I do bulk buying and selling, escrow transactions.

Ive never mined so I could use a trusted source of instruction oon how to mine. Right now Im mining from qt - but I have no idea how to look at whats going on under the hood. I need some tools to see that my client is actually doing something with all the cycles its using.