Toggling graphics for high intensity situations

There's a long thread about probing formations on Fail Heap Challenge here. But to summarise : Optimal depends on your circumstances.

If signal strength is your target, and time/effort setting up your scanning configuration doesn't matter, then the best layout would probably be either a cube or rectangular antiprism. These two would probably take the longest to set up out of the different kind of arrangements but might be good for scanning down a ship that has been purposely fitted to make scanning a lot harder, previously known as "unprobeable" set-ups.

Usually an Octahedron is a "good enough" balance between ease of set-up and scan strength. It is reasonably easy to make by imagining a compass laying flat where your ship is and launching 6 probes, then drag one of them in each of the directions North, South, East, West, and also one straight up and one straight down. Handily, each of these directions to drag in correspond to the same directions as the positioning arrows around each of the probes.

If time is a telling factor (which is most likely in combat situations) then the regular tetrahedron still works fine, although you may get slighty less scan strength than you did before.

Buy an exploration frigate (Heron, Probe, Magnate and Imicus) and start scanning down sites in high-sec. While they aren't very good at combat, Relic and Data sites no longer have any enemy NPCs in them, so you don't need any combat capabilites. And in the very beginning, the bonus to scanning should be very helpful when your scanning skills are still low and you don't have much experience with scanning. Later on you should be able to scan high-sec sites in a ship without a scanning bonus.

You probably can't run any DED complexes in an exploration frigate, but you should be able to run the Data and Relic sites easily.

I would recommend to learn scanning with an exploration frigate, and if you find a site that is too difficult you can reship to a combat ship. Once you are comfortable scanning and want to continue it, you probably want to change to either a combat ship, a Sisters of Eve ship like the Stratios or a T3 cruiser. But for the beginning you should just try it out and scan some sites, and don't be too disappointed if you only find wormholes in the beginning (don't go through them).