Two days ago I posted an article about my experience with NRG and how I started staking on my home laptop. And then it was shared on the Reddit.

Someone commented this:

"Im not encouraging anyone to do this, but i cant have my pc runing 24/7, so i transfered all my coins to kucoin. They are doing staking for you. I know its a risk losing everything if exchange gets hacked, but i kinda trust them."

Which got me thinking. The average guy wouldn't really be able to have wallet working in the background on his PC or laptop(as I do). Just my machine is more powerful than the average laptop and doesn't really bother me. I have it running 24/7 with NRG core wallet, CryptoTab browser on max power(getting about 0.00005 BTC/day with one laptop and 1 PC, both running Ryzen CPU's), a Chrome Browser, a Brave Browser and ton of other stuff that I use on my daily driver. Point is that the Core wallet does not really affect my PC as much you would expect.

Here's a screenshot just to give you an idea:

0.3% CPU utilization and 361 MB RAM usage. And by the way, I got another payout the other day, just 17 hours after the first one. Which makes for now 4% monthly return, which is insane.

But lets discuss something else - what could you do, if you do not want/can't use your daily driver for staking.

1) You could rent a VPS - it is a Virtual server by any hosting provider. I do not recommend using any of those except may be Amazon Web Services, Alibaba cloud services or Google Cloud platform. Those I trust. Any of the others you might find, never-mind what prices are they are offering are subject to bankruptcy at any moment. Just 2 weeks ago I found an article about 20 different VPS hosting providers closing doors within the same week, giving their customers just 48 hours to clean up their servers. So, for me, using such service is out of the question. Amazon, Alibaba and Google are offering Windows VPS at pretty low prices -> from $5 per month. Of course you can choose Linux, but it requires more work and more knowledge, so it is not for everyone. So when you get the VPS, you log in, install whatever Core Wallets you might want to use and start Staking same way you would do it on any other machine.

2) Get a dedicated laptop to do this.

I recently purchased for the price of 50 Euro an old used laptop HP Elitebook 2170p. And I plan to turn it in my staking machine.

This is a 11.6" small-form factor laptop with i5-3XXX Intel CPU. It does not eat a lot of power - it is about 30-40 Watts(when on load, much less if it's CPU is not used), which is about the same as a light bulb. So I have installed Windows 10(it came with Windows 7 sticker, which still can be used for Windows 10, which is awesome from Microsoft's side), put another 4GBs of DDR3 So-dim(10 Euro) attach it on cable connection, install NRG Core wallet(and any other Core wallets that you might want to stake other coins) and Enjoy. What else you can do with that laptop in order to maximize it's profit in order for it to pay for itself. Install software such as Honeygain, PacketStream (both are paying for your unused network bandwidth) and of course CryptoTab(which mines you Bitcoin). I'm sure there are other services that you might find useful to be hosted on your "Staking laptop".

This setup let's you keep the Staking up as much of your Internet is reliable. Also make sure you install a proper AntiVirus and make an exception from the CryptoTab browser.

I hope you guys find this useful. I'd like also to hear from you if you have any ideas of other ways to utilize the "staking laptop". There is whole other topic about running a Masternode, but I will leave it for another time.