If you have a decent spec graphics card in your pc why not put it to use and mine some Ethereum while you are afk or asleep? It's easy to set up and once your miner is configured you just run the program when you want to mine and leave your pc to do its thing.
A mid tier gaming pc with a recent GPU could easily generate you up to a dollar a day at today's price and potentially a lot more if you are prepared to hold onto your coins.
While mining Bitcoin used to be profitable with GPUs this is no longer the case as most mining operations are now carried out with massive mining farms with highly specific (and expensive!) hardware.
Many alternative crypto-currencies (altcoins) still rely on GPU mining and are somewhat profitable to do so, including Ethereum.
Make your hardware work for you!
Step 1) Register with a pool, I recommend suprnova.
https://eth.suprnova.cc
You will need to register using your email address, a password and a PIN number, don't forget your PIN as you will need it to withdraw coins you have mined.
Step 2) Create your workers.
Once registered with Suprnova, one the left menu bar go to My Account, then My Workers.
Click "add new worker" to create two new workers and name them 1 and 2. Leave the password space empty or just type 1 and click update workers. Passwords are not needed for workers, the pool does not even check for them so don't worry about that. You now have 2 workers.
You workers should be yourusename.1 and yourusername.2. One will be mining Ethereum and the other will be mining Decred.
Step 3) Download your miner.
This is your mining program, there are many to choose from and we will be using Claymore's miner which is stable and also allows us to mine two different coins at the same time, this is called merge mining. Get the most recent version here -
https://github.com/nanopool/Claymore-Dual-Miner/releases
You will need to unzip this to a folder. Some antivirus programs do not like mining software so you may need to temporarily disable yours while it downloads and unzips. (Don't worry, always go to github for clean software)
Step 4) Config settings.
Now we need to create a .bat file with the settings of your pool so your miner knows what to connect to and what to do. This is easier than it sounds.
First just open the folder you unzipped containing Claymores miner open it and look for a file called start.bat, right click this and select edit. You will be brought to a text editor.
You're looking for this
Paste the following code into this document and save it. (make sure it is saved as a .bat and not a .txt file.
ethdcrminer64.exe -epool eth.suprnova.cc:5005 -ewal WORKER.1 -epsw x -esm 3 -dpool dcr.suprnova.cc:3252 -dwal WORKER.2 -dpsw x -allpools 1
(Replace WORKER.1 and WORKER.2 with your username you registered with)
If for some reason there is not a start.bat file in the folder you can create one by right clicking>new>text document. Then save it with the filename start.bat with the same code above pasted in.
Double click start.bat to start your miner. You can also create a shortcut to the bat file to place on your desktop.
You are now mining Ethereum and Decred. You may keep any coins you mine on the pool site but this is not advisable. It is recommended you set up wallets for both these coins to keep them safe.
https://www.myetherwallet.com/
https://wallet.decred.org
Make sure to keep a record of your passphrases and private keys as these are you backups just in case.
That's it, run the miner when you are afk and you'll see coins falling into your wallets in no time.
Any problems or questions feel free to leave a comment. Happy mining.