i’m in the market for a new laptop but i’m not sure if i need an i5 or an i7. i work from home as an online tutor along with a few other online gigs and currently have an i5. however, especially with tutoring, i have noticed significant lagging and crashing of applications sometimes during sessions with students because i generally have to have multiple windows and apps running at the same time. even outside of tutoring, it also lags/crashes frequently whenever i am running my different photo editing and drawing softwares - i use corel paintshop pro and krita, along with a photo stacking software (deepskystacker). so i’m thinking i might need the i7 anyway just for these? i will admit though that i generally have a lot of chrome tabs open at all times, which i know slows down processing significantly (idk if there’s anything i can do about this because my adhd brain will literally forget about something i needed to look up/research unless i have the tab constantly open where i can see it 😅). so i’m not sure if the lagging/crashing is simply because of that, or if i do in fact need to upgrade to a faster processor. i do not game or code or otherwise use programs that require a lot of processing power.

based on all of this, would an i5 or i7 be best for my needs?

edit: also what is the difference between an i5 with 10 cores vs something like an i7 with 8 cores? would the i5 be faster in this case? and do threads play into the speed at all?