Just some Newbie's Questions.

[Parlament]

Hiyas! My first day and post on this forum, and I'm enthusiastic. I happened to stumble upon Bitcoin listening to some alternative talk radio, and it seemed like a pretty neat venture to go for. 

First off, I'd like to ask the difference/advantages between soloing and pooling. Outside of sharing with others and the process being sped up in a pool, that is. It might take longer, but apparently you get more out of being the only one to mine a block.

Second, I'd like to know how to build or where to get a good miner starting off, since my laptop can only kick out an average of 700 khash. 

Also, is there anything that would make using Litecoin a good alternative, considering all I really have is my MacBook and an old Acer? I heard that Lite was optimized for standard non-specialized rigs.

Outside of all that, thanks for having me! 

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[DeathAndTaxes]

With 700KH/s you can just forget about mining.  I know you are excited but the end result will be you earning less than a cent and likely destroying your laptop.

All miners make the same amount in the long run.  Pooled mining just reduces variance.   Would you rather have $1 per day or a 1% chance at $100 each day.  The expected value is the same.   Now some pools charge fees and that reduces the expected value of mining.  It is simply a trade of a little less revenue for more consistent revenue.

[SardonicJester]

Like DeathAndTaxes said, you can forget about mining coins for profit.

But if you wanted to do it just for fun, I would mine Litecoin. (Not for profitability reasons, but because the payout is faster due to lower difficulty)

Unless you have an awesome rig, pooled mining is the way to go. (But since I am new too, I don't know cpu mining works on pools)


Here is a hardware comparison. (So you can get an estimate of what your laptop will do)

https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

And a calculator to determine how much you will make and profitability vs btc.

http://allchains.info/calc.html

[DannyHamilton]

With 700KH/s you can just forget about mining. 
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Specifically, with 700 kHash/sec (if the difficulty doesn't increase, and be aware that it is very likely likely to increase over time), you can expect to average approximately 0.00004648 BTC per day (that's about $0.00348 per day at the current exchange rate) if you mine continuously non-stop 24 hours per day.  How much will you pay for the electricity or maintenance of the laptop over time to earn that $0.00348 per day?  Perhaps it would be faster and cheaper to simply use a currency exchange and exchange your local currency for bitcoin directly?

If you don't mine in a pool, you can expect that you will solve a block on average once every 19.65 years.  If you get extremely lucky and happen to stumble across that block in the next 4 years, you'll get 25 BTC.  If you are unlucky and don't stumble across that block for 24 years, that block might only get you 0.390625 BTC (plus any transaction fees from transactions you include in that block.  So you could spend 24 years (or more) mining and earn nothing for it.