I would like to mine promosing alt coins to be there from the beginning before many people starts mining them! So as soon as the announcement is done i want to start mining!
If there's an announcement and it's promising, you're already too late with your $500.
You're basically gambling.
If you're going to gamble, pick the riskiest bet which is to mine a non-promising coin and hope it goes up in price. Find the one with the lowest difficulty.
As for using your laptop, unless you're using a gaming laptop you would be a fool to mine on a laptop. Gaming laptops have decent copper heatpipes for the CPU. Don't even try GPU mining or you'll be out a $1500 laptop.