OK, so I find that I'm using my laptop as a TV more and more with Netflix, Amazon On Demand, etc and I often hook up to my TV with an HDMI cable and use a dual monitor setting so I can watch on the TV and still work on the laptop screen. This has proven to be quite taxing to my current machine. It gets quite warm and has gone into some kind of "failure mode" a couple times, I think just before melting itself.
The specs on my current machine are:
HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC
AMD Turion X2 Dual Core Mobile RM-72 2.10 Ghz
4.0 GB RAM
64 bit OS
Vista Home Premium SP2
Other than the TV/video I use it for typical stuff - surfing, documents, spreadsheets, itunes, nothing terribly taxing.
So, given my uses, what would I need to change in order to have the muscle necessary to handle what I do? I assume more processing speed and/or RAM, but is there more to it than that? Any other specs or particular attributes/devices I should pay attention to?
Thanks in advance for the help!!