Might want to uninstall all of those with Revo, then run a MalwareBytes scan, then an AdwCleaner scan, then uninstall any drives and douse with gasoline and fire.
Only advantage to 4GB would be if you go to a higher resolution, and want to get a second card, or if the price difference is very small between 2GB and 4GB. Other than that, really no reason to get the 4GB.
Depends what you're doing, Windows Movie Maker is probably OK, but for something more complicated you're going to want to go paid, maybe something like Premiere or Vegas?
Congrats on winning, but I think you should sell it now and get a better card for the money. AMD cards are pretty inflated at the moment because of the cryptocoin rush, so you could sell this for a good chunk and get a still sufficient card for less money.
I use Private Internet Access and I really like it, I went from about 30Mb/s down and 6Mb/s up from 28Mb/s down and 9Mb/s up. It's $40 a year, and completely worth it. Considering you live near Chicago, latency should be really low considering they have some servers there.
Sorry, I was scrolled up enough to not see it. As for the laptop, I think you should get something in Lenovo's Y line. Spending $2000 on a laptop seems like a waste to me, considering nearly all gaming laptops have just a 1080p screen. If you get more horsepower, you're going to have a heavier and more power-hungry machine. I think around $900-$1200 is the sweet spot, you can even spend a bit on an SSD upgrade and have a great system for around $1400.
Why do you think you need a laptop? For $2000 you could get a good desktop and something like an Ultrabook for portability, or even split the budget and get something like a $800-1000 laptop and a $1000-1200 desktop.
For $2100, I think you should get a good desktop and something like an Ultrabook for portability. If you already have a desktop, just save your money and get a laptop in the $1000 range.
My vote goes to Avast, so you should just uninstall Norton and replace it with Avast. It isn't a good idea to run two active AVs at the same time, even if you partially turn one off. You should also download MalwareBytes free, it's really handy for scanning a specific file or just getting rid of general viruses, where Avast is more of a real-time attack blocker, say if you ran a malicious .exe file, or visited a malicious webpage.