laptop for student with a little more ommph + noob questions

I'm going to be getting a laptop sometime soon, and im wondering what kind of specs it should have for my purposes. I'm mostly going to be using it mainly for music(I have 4000+songs), AIM, internet, word processing, photoshoping pictures(although I dont really do it that much), and possibly some gaming, but nothing like half life 2, im mostly into RTS games like warcraft 3(which works on my current computer thats 6 years old), but I might get world of warcraft.

and ive heard that its best to have 512mb of ram to run xp pretty smoothly, but i want this laptop to last me a while so should i get 1 gig or ram?

I'm not to familiar with the pentium M's except for the article i read on cnet and that it doesnt use up as much power and stuff, but what kind of a pentium M processor should i get to have this laptop run pretty well?

also im confused with the drives, i read an another article here on cnet about switching drives, do i have to actually take the cd-rw drive out and put in a cd-rom drive to do different things? or can a cd-rw drive play cd-roms as well as a regular cd-rom drive?

and what sound and video card should i have too.. im pretty concerned with having good sound on it since music is going to be a big thing with my laptop... can i get it to have sound that matches those of a desktop pc if i get some speakers for it.. or could i hook it up to a stereo using an S video port? a lot of the time i'll be using headphones with it, but it'd be pretty sweet if i could get some good sound on it without headphones. as far as a videocard goes i want something that can handle most things, although the video is not as important to be since im mainly just using the internet and listening to music and stuff of that sort.

and could someone explain how i get a laptop to be connected to the internet? i dont have a router or network set up in my house, we just have the dsl directly connected to the family comp.. and i was thinking of getting a second modem and setting that up in my room and just having it directly connected that way in my room. and having mobile internet doesnt really matter to me, if im on the go, im usually in a car, or on a plane going somewhere(although thats rarely). if i got the second modem for my room, would i have to pay for an extra dsl connection, or can i have 2 dsl modems sharing the same dsl line??(without paying extra) can i just have to set up the filter, then connect everything and im up online..?

many thanks to all who respond!