I am very interested in mining, but I know my hardware is not capable of competing with the others. Still, I would like to give it a try regardless just to experiment and see what I can learn. I would like to try mining Steem. I have spent the last 24 hours watching and reading different tutorials on mining in general (and they are all different) and I have read a number of posts about mining Steem, but I am just getting myself more and more confused and I think I am about to lose it. Some say I can do it in windows, some say I need to run a linux vm. Most have links that are no longer working. I am not the most tech-savvy of individuals, but I can follow directions if they are not confusing. And though I may need to be spoon fed at first I can usually learn to feed myself. Can anyone please help me out. Are there any currencies out there that are worth mining on my laptop?
I have a Lenova Yoga 710 laptop running windows 10. It has an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX as well as a Intel(R) HD Graphics 620 graphic card.
Any help would be greatly appreciated and thank you in advance for putting up with my numbskullery. 
To keep you from wasting your time, I'll give you the short version. You CANNOT mine STEEM anymore. The guys who designed it decided to take away mining ability for STEEM after hard fork 17.
Most of mining software tend to gear toward open source (free software) so if you can install Ubuntu LTS, you should be able to download miner for majority of coins.
If you want to make a profit (after paying electricity), you want a GPU mining rig (one mother board connects to 4-6 GPUS at the same time), coins like Ethereum depend solely on GPU for mining. Coins like XMR require both good GPU and decent amount of memory/RAM.
Since you're not really savvy at all this computer bs, I would suggest looking into a relatively respectable cloud mining service and sink your money there. Beware that the initial cost of buying that service/hardware is expensive and you'll only see profit after 3 months or so. That's how long it takes to break even.
thank you for shedding some more light on this for me.
No problem, man. I looked for it myself, might as well save you some time.
Don't you think pool mining is more profitable on sites like genesis and hashflare?
I have no idea. This is all what I am trying to find out.
Genesis and Hashflare are cloud mining services which you can use at your own risk. The thing about cloud mining services is that they can turn on you and run away with your money, or if profit margin becomes negative, they can just end your contract. There's no guarantee they'll resume after it becomes profitable again. Do your own research about them but as far as I know, only Hashnest is somewhat trustworthy comparing to the rest.
thank you
Do not try to mine on a laptop if you want it to be alive in the future. You could do it but it is not a good idea. Best of luck.
Thank you for your input, but why is that? As I stated, I am not necessarily looking to make a profit, just looking to learn from the experience. I unfortunately cannot afford to build a desktop for this purpose at the moment.
Because laptop hardware are cramped into smaller space, that makes them prone to overheat and easier to fail. There are not enough ventilation except either a side or back heat sink and some bottom heat mesh.
even with a solid state drive?
Solid state drive is to store to data over long period of time which is pretty unrelated when it comes to mining. Mining either uses graphic cards (GPU) or CPU. Having a badass hard drive doesn't help if your GPU and CPU are weak.
okay, thanks for explaining