Multi Computer Mining

[thegolden24]

My apartment building has a computer room of 6 desktops and a Laptop. Since these are free to use I wondered if I could mine some small altcoins at night for some spare btc. But I am new to mining(the specifics), I don't know the brand of the computers or their specs but they are around 3 years old. Ive been watching and trading bitcoin for almost a year now so why not utilize idle computing power? Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.

[byt411]

My apartment building has a computer room of 6 desktops and a Laptop. Since these are free to use I wondered if I could mine some small altcoins at night for some spare btc. But I am new to mining(the specifics), I don't know the brand of the computers or their specs but they are around 3 years old. Ive been watching and trading bitcoin for almost a year now so why not utilize idle computing power? Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.

To mine altcoins, you need powerful graphics cards. The laptop won't be useful, and we don't know about the desktops.
Get the specs, or we can't help.

Download MSI afterburner, it will at least tell you what series the graphics cards are.

[thegolden24]

theres 5 dell OptiPlex 760 desktops and one mac desktop that I don't know the name of. Im not trying to mine the bigger coins, basically just want to mine newer coin with less difficulty and take the gamble to hold or sell.

[grippy54]

You can mine on any computer. The issue is really regarding whether these particular computers will be able to provide any results. They are old and probably have crappy video cards in them. You may end up just cpu mining.

For the Mac, go with MacMiner. It can do cpu and gpu at the same time. For the PCs you may need to try cgminer (or sgminer) and cpuminer to see if they work.

More than likely, they won't provide much in return and may raise the ire of your fellow tenants or even the building management since they will slow down any machine they are running on.