What's the alternative to bitcoins that can be profitably mined by beginner? I have tons of CPU and a reasonably good GPU.

Should I used the CPU to mine namecoin and the GPU to mine litecoin? Or perhaps some other combination? Or what?
Namecoin is mergemined with Bitcoin, so the difficulty is near as high as bitcoin.
You may as well mine bitcoin and connect to a pool that allows Merged Mining Namecoins -- and you'll get uBTC bitcoins with no additional effort.

I recommend to leave the CPU alone especially if you're on windows, because i've noticed mining with both GPU and CPU is terrible because the CPU is required to submit and if the CPU is tied up with another application -- say NMC mining then the KH/s from litecoin will go down.