I was thinking
I have a old desktop, so i would just upgrade the GPU to a:
$200 Radeon 7950 which should recover cost in 100 days through WDC. But surely there must be better GPU mining solutions for more profit?
Not profitable as you forget about your motherboard, power supply, ram and etc. You would be paying a total of $800 just to house 1 GPU.
Work the exchanges and mine coins on release? Meaning?
Mine new coins as they are released on the Altcoin forum (here) while the difficulties are lower. Take your current coins to the exchanges, cryptsy, mcxnow and others, sell when the price is high, buy back when the prices are lower. Do this over and over and your wallet will grow. Probably much faster than running 1x7950. But nothing is free so the rewards will be from your efforts on the exchanges. More efforts == more rewards.
EDIT: by that u would mean altcoins in purgatory on this list, correct: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/list-of-all-cryptocoins-134179