Didn't someone mine thousands of bitcoins back in the early days on an old Pentium 4? I can understand how you might need a good GPU to mine litecoins and maybe dogecoins since their difficulty is quite high because of their popularity but surely something as tiny as kittehcoin should be mineable on a normal PC?

I knew about bitcoin back in 2012 when the price went from virtually zero to $30 then back down to $3 but I never really did anything with it. Now I understand that you need a really good graphics card or specialized ASIC mining equipment to even mine a single bitcoin. So I decided to look into alt-coins to get my head around this whole cryptocurrency thing. I'm not looking into making a profit or anything. So anyway, I set up a dogecoin wallet a day or two ago and got 1.7 dogecoin from a dogecoin faucet. Neat.

However syncing seems to be very slow. It takes hours. About half an hour ago I started up the dogecoin program again and it said "out of sync". Ten minutes ago, it was at 7760 blocks remaining. Now it says 7730 blocks remaining.

Next I tried kittehcoin. I was looking into joining a mining pool but decided to try the built-in miner to see how many coins I could get. I've been running the thing for over two hours but haven't managed to mine a single coin yet. It says that I'm getting 500 hashes a second which seems quite low because I hear of people online getting upwards of 1,000,000 hashes per second.

My computer is a netbook with a 1.66 GHz single-core Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM, Intel integrated graphics, and Windows XP. I understand that kittehcoin is a scrypt-based so a state-of-the-art graphics card is not needed and a CPU should work just fine.

So what's going on here? Is my hardware too weak? Do I need to join a pool for anything to happen?