Consumer laptops of the last decade seemed to have been designed under the idea that they will idle, webbrowse or play DVDs most of the time, so the thermal management has a tendency to be inadequate to running full load for long. Business class laptops especially those that might have been aimed at the design and CAD market might be a bit better. Dell has generally been "adequate" in normal use, provided sensible precautions are followed, such as taking care vents aren't blocked and blowing it out with air on a regular basis. Myself I have had very bad luck with compaq and acer products built since 2006 and would recommend that owners should avoid loading them excessively, or even turning them on unless absolutely essential.... if they want them to last more than a couple of days past the end of the warranty period.
Anyway, that aside, unfortunately the bitcoin network has gained so much power over the last 6 months that your laptop is incapable of making a noticable amount of bitcoins now. Basically, there is a controlled average of 10 mins a block and 25 bitcoins are "made" every block and that's all there is, it's luck based, but on average your hash power buys an amount of tickets to this lottery in accordance with your share of the total hashpower on the network. Since the total hash is very very big and your hash is very very small, it earns you a barely measurable sliver.
This is because there are now special purpose bitcoin ASICs, dedicated chips for mining bitcoin which are an order of magnitude faster than fast GPUs, which are an order of magnitude faster than CPUs at mining.
You have not said whether you're actually using the CPU miner on your C2D or the GPU miner on the 8600, 8600 desktop cards get only a couple of tens of Megahash, so 5 Mhahs doesn't seem that unusual for a mobile chipset, nor does it seem unusual for the CPU.
Anyway, although you might be able to get things tuned up so you're getting 30Mhash altogether from both CPU cores and GPU together... it's still very small.
Not that I want to discourage you from using bitcoin, but the least unprofitable thing you could mine on your laptop now would be "Primecoin" I think, which is CPU only at the moment, and early enough in it's development that CPUs can make a profit if electricity is cheap.... and there's also chances of value increases in the coin.
Anyway, that aside, unfortunately the bitcoin network has gained so much power over the last 6 months that your laptop is incapable of making a noticable amount of bitcoins now. Basically, there is a controlled average of 10 mins a block and 25 bitcoins are "made" every block and that's all there is, it's luck based, but on average your hash power buys an amount of tickets to this lottery in accordance with your share of the total hashpower on the network. Since the total hash is very very big and your hash is very very small, it earns you a barely measurable sliver.
This is because there are now special purpose bitcoin ASICs, dedicated chips for mining bitcoin which are an order of magnitude faster than fast GPUs, which are an order of magnitude faster than CPUs at mining.
You have not said whether you're actually using the CPU miner on your C2D or the GPU miner on the 8600, 8600 desktop cards get only a couple of tens of Megahash, so 5 Mhahs doesn't seem that unusual for a mobile chipset, nor does it seem unusual for the CPU.
Anyway, although you might be able to get things tuned up so you're getting 30Mhash altogether from both CPU cores and GPU together... it's still very small.
Not that I want to discourage you from using bitcoin, but the least unprofitable thing you could mine on your laptop now would be "Primecoin" I think, which is CPU only at the moment, and early enough in it's development that CPUs can make a profit if electricity is cheap.... and there's also chances of value increases in the coin.
This man knows what he's talking.
