If I used something besides my laptop what would be best to start with and how do you find coins that are meant for CPU or GPU or different things how do you tell the difference
AFAIK, all coins should be CPU minable, the thing is, most of the time, the diff would be so high it's nearly impossible to mine a block with the cpu.
Some algorithms are also suitable for GPU mining. I found this thread listing GPU minable coins: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1349070.0
That being said: the GPU in your laptop is most likely an onboard GPU, that's not really suitable for GPU mining.
I'm still sticking to my original advise: buy a second hand ASIC on the forum (use escrow!!!), mine bitcoin or a low-diff sha256 altcoin, build some experience
Don't expect to make any profit (not even enough to pay back the ASIC)https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=016660200577587308545%3Aesf40ml9aag&ie=UTF-8&q=wtb+antminer+s3&sa=Google+search#gsc.tab=0&gsc.q=wts%20antminer%20s3&gsc.sort=
S3's used to cost $50-$75, with the halving around the corner, you might pick one up for even less than that...