Setting up a mining rig

I'm curious about mining earnings. Is there anyone here who mines using a regular laptop without an external graphics card and just an i3 CPU? If you do, how much do you make and what coin are you mining? Is it a smart move to mine while using an i3 laptop for other small tasks, especially if it doesn’t overheat? I checked some mining profitability calculators, but they say I could earn around $1, which seems really low. I’d like to hear from real people about their earnings with such basic specs. Also, what’s the most profitable coin to mine right now?

If you talking about mining BTC using a laptop then you won't earn a single penny and it's not profitable. ASIC machines are the only miner that can mine Bitcoin with profit(depending on your current power cost) and it's Plug'n'Play you just need to point it where you want to mine. Check this tool below to find what miners are profitable and scroll to the bottom to edit power cost and use search filter with this keyword SHA-256 to filter units that can mine BTC. - https://www.asicminervalue.com/

currently, Mining isn't that profitable as before and you can't really make a good profit with how the crypto market is right now. I've been mining before using GPUs but stopped doing that since months ago, I never mined with a regular laptop as you said cause there's a chance that you could damage it with overheating, because when you start mining, your GPU will be on use on a 100% rate. I used to mine ethereum since the difficulty wasn't high and I could've won much more money compared to the other tokens. If you really wanna try it, then go for it, but as I said you won't make such a good profit on an i3 laptop. If there's not heating, then you're good to go. In my opinion mining using a laptop or even using few graphic cards ain't that much more profitable. If you don't pay for electricity and you can afford to buy a lot of graphic cards or antminers then yeah it's going to be profitable at some points.

Which tool did you use to calculate your earnings? Are you referring to altcoin mining or Bitcoin mining? I don't think you can even make a $1 with your setup even if you mine altcoin. Most of them work by looking at the current hashrate and the price of the coin you want to mine, so while it is not always accurate, the result should not be that far off (as long as you use a good tool and not an outdated website). If you don't have other devices or the capital to buy some of them, I suggest you buy coins directly and swing trade/DCA if you want to earn some returns on your investment in a respectable manner. Don't bother looking at cloud mining or something similar, most of them are scams and if you're looking at Binance cloud mining, the return is negligible afaik. The risk is also greater compared to buying some coins and saving them on an air-gapped device. Beware of mining extensions too, at the best case scenario they turn your computer into a botnet, at worst it is a keylogger/malware. CMIIW.