Altcoins can pay off. I got in very early on Dogecoin mining with modest hardware and recently pocketed $500 USD selling it on Reddit and eBay. So, in conclusion $500 in a couple weeks for doing basically nothing but providing GPU/CPU power ain't a bad deal. 
Sometimes it pays off, and other times you get almost nothing, I mean when you mine all starting coins first day only when the difficulty is low
Yeah, and Doge seems to be the exception to the rule that most altcoins aren't worth bothering with. I have a feeling the value will plummet in maybe a couple months though once the novelty wears off... I'm hoping otherwise.