It is my understanding that the purpose of each core processor is to let you run a single program while other programs are using other processors. That way they don't have to share processing resources and get Windows confused. And is is probably a good idea to have at least one extra core that will handle disk I/O requested by the other cores.

I could see having a few extra core around. But who except some specialized researchers would really need more than 4, and who on Earth would need 16? The computer might start displaying "BORING" messages.

It is easy to require massive amounts of data storage room if you are collecting music files and videos. But for relatively simple scientific projects 3 gigabytes are a lot of data. I save music files as MP3 on an external disk drive where they are out of the way. MP3 files are easy to work with and don't take up a lot of room.

For people who would like to download music files from youtube.com there is a program called something like youtube2MP3 that is available through sourceforge.net. You find the music file using Internet Explorer and then copy its address to youtube2MP3. And it will download it and convert it to an MP3 file. Note that the downloads can be very slow depending on your Internet hookup etc. And if people looked around they might find even better ways to create MP3 files from youtube.com music files.

I am assuming that creating those files is legal. So far I haven't seen anything that states otherwise. If it is not then don't do that.