What if I buy a cheap 360M/H for $30 and use it to mine alt coins?
What altcoin should I mine and what pool should I use?
You can't use ASIC BTC equipment on alt coins if the 360M/H is what you are referring to. Alts are Scrypt and the ASICs only work on the SHA coins.
So you only have a laptop? Thats pretty limiting. You could probably piecemeal to pretty basic system together for cheap though. I am running 2x R9 290's off a 6 year old motherboard with no issues. Then hit up ebay for some lower end ATI cards. I have a 6870 that I'm getting ready to get rid of that does about 300KH/s on alts. They go for cheap on ebay, like 80 bucks, and you can run them with a cheap power supply. Running some linux distro like ubuntu would help out too, but if there isn't a pre-compiled cgminer out there it could be some trouble to get cgminer built from source. You could also maybe even find a used machine with Windows on it on ebay or a local recycle shop. Only real important item to address is RAM, power supply and verifying the machine has PCIe.
Finding a good pool just takes floating around until you find one that is stable and has a good payout system for your rig. Usually my very basic benchmark of a pool is how fast the front end loads. If their server lags spitting out a webpage chances are its gonna have a hard time keeping up on the backend.
Like others have mentioned, it could also be viable to take that 400 and buy BTC when its low then use the BTC to buy new alts as they come out then cash out as they hit their bubble. Wash rinse and repeat. If you can get some coin
https://www.bitcoinstore.com is a good place to buy computer stuff with BTC. Some of it is a generation old but still works fine.
middlecoin.com is a pretty good site to just let a miner run cause it automagically picks the best alt to mine then pays you in BTC. I'll let my miners run on it if i am between alts or as a failover.
Good luck!
