You said "I have noticed that in Google Chrome, if I open up a new tab and surf the web my hash rate will drop from over 1k to under 100. To avoid this, I open up a new window for my web surfing. As long as you don't minimize the window you are mining in, your hash rate should not drop too much.".

This is because how browsers work.A browser is alocating resources to the page for it to run.When you are on that page the page gets lots of resources but when you only have it open and you're on another tab it will get a small amount just so it can continously run the page(not to crash or do wierd things).