You definitely need either Captcha Sniper or GSA Captcha Breaker. GSA eats through thousands upon thousands of captchas every day. Captcha Sniper is about half the price (Google for the $27 discount coupon to make it $70) so I'd recommend that for your situation.
You can run it on a home computer, but the specs need to be there. I like to have everything in front of me (and not be paying monthly for a VPS) so I went out and bought a refurb 8gig i5 desktop. You can run it on anything above 2gb of RAM, but you will have to adjust the amount of threads you are running.
You need proxies for sure. NewIPNow does 20 private proxies for $20 monthly - this is what I started on. You can run 100 threads pretty safely with 20 proxies.
Scrapebox is also extremely helpful to scrape target URLs. GSA has a built in crawler to find you new targets, but SB tends to be a lot more efficient, especially for finding 2.0, article, and wiki sites to post to.
As for tips and tutorials, there are a million out there. I personally watched Matthew Woodward's tutorial because it was recommended to me and it explained everything you need to know.
Last but not least, you'll want some sort of text spinner. I recommend TheBestSpinner, but I believe Spinnerchief still has a free version.