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
It has some good step by step instructions for setting up cgminer on windows. If you are still unable to get it working, please provide more detail about the failure.