If you are just starting out and have no hardware I would suggest that you start mining LTC with any CPU's or GPU's you have around. I am running virtual machines on a number of large servers that have excess capacity for mining LTC. They manage to mine about 1 LTC a day using cgminer. If its bitcoins you are after you can then trade them online at one of the coin exchanges.
how exactly do i do that? I could not get cgminer or pooler cpu running on win xp, have no clue what I am doing wrong. I input all the proper values as far as i know, but the dos window just keeps repeating the command line ad infinitum. Using pooler on the laptop with win7, same exact values in the bat, runs fine