What are the CPU requirements for fastest speed using public wifi?
This would be a laptop running Linux [probably Mint] with occasional boots from a Linux Tails LiveUSB.
I don’t want an “over-powered” CPU with capabilities I don’t need–So how many cores and what speed? Would this vary with different wifi?
CPU speed has little to do with WiFi speed. What application or activity are you trying to optimize?
Most public and shared WiFi is limited by many factors beyond the user’s control. I’d go so far as to say any reasonably new laptop can max out the available speeds in most such locations.
On a laptop with Linux Mint, will do typical web browsing with Firefox; occasional use of Linux Tails LiveUSB for financial/banking transactions.
So I need max speed+security on public wifi–want to be sure the laptop is not underpowered, but since I won’t use the laptop for CPU-intensive stuff like gaming, video editing, image processing, etc, I don’t want to be over-powered either–
I’ve read that using Linux Tails LiveUSB can be slow–
Thanks for info+suggestions [I’m newbie to laptop and wifi use…]
Unless “typical web browsing” for you includes a heck of a lot of streaming video, none of that even requires particularly fast WiFi.
As noted, WiFi speed isn’t affected by CPU speed to any great degree. It’s more a matter of distance from your access point/signal strength, how congested it is (i.e. how many people are actually on the AP), your internet speed on the front end (I recall a friend who had an 802.11 AC wireless AP and the newest WiFi NIC and not understanding why things were so slow…only to have me do a speed test on his wired connect to find that his internet was doing less than a MB/S upload and download :p) and what version of 802.11 you are using and what frequency it’s running at/how congested are the frequencies in the area (since 802.11 is FCC open), etc etc. Your CPU speed is pretty much moot compared to those other things.
Ask one of the other day traders in the Starbucks what they’re using. 
OP here–thanks for info; since CPU speed isn’t critical, I can probably get a used laptop–with for example an AMD Athlon II, dual core, 2-3.0 GHz CPU?
Any other HW tips, like for wireless cards, etc?
Going to depend on the AP you are accessing. I’d go with something that has either the latest (802.11 AC) or close standard and go with 5.0 ghz verse the older 2.4 ghz frequency if you are worried about optimizing your throughput on the wireless side. Really, let your use and proposed applications drive your decisions wrt CPU, GPU, memory and the like…so, your proposed setup is really driven by what you plan to do with it. If that setup is fine for the application then that’s great…it just doesn’t impact wireless access speeds, which are driven by other factors as noted.
Public wifi usually isn’t particularly fast or secure.
But any laptop that runs your Linux well will do wifi just fine. Web access isn’t a very intensive process for a computer, unless you open a lot of tabs/windows at once.
And if you do open a lot of tabs or windows at once, it’s usually more of a strain on the memory than on the processor.
Also, welcome to the government watchlist.
Tails isn’t slow because of the computer on which you use it, it is slow because the Tor network sends the the data through several extra hops around the world rather than on a more direct path from the website to your computer. Some of those extra hops are likely to encounter congestion.
You can get an idea of how it will perform by downloading and trying the Tor Browser on your current computer. It is perfectly usable / functional, just somewhat slower than standard browsing.
Oh, and there are also two completely different measures of connection speed, and which one is relevant depends on what you’re doing. Bandwidth determines how much data can get to you in any given amount of time, while latency determines how long it takes for any given bit of data to get to you. If you’re watching streaming movies, low bandwidth will mean that you’ll have to wait for it to buffer up most of the movie before it can start, and might mean that you have to wait to buffer again in the middle, if it didn’t buffer enough to begin with. But high latency would just mean that you’re seeing the movie a second or so later than someone else watching it. On the other hand, most online games use very little bandwidth, but high latency can mean that another player turns the corner and shoots you before you even get a chance to see them.