Any suggestions on a decently priced machine that's portable, and I mean 4-6 hours of battery and wife capable would be fine. I'm not married to the chromebook by any means.
wife capable, so basically text editing and porn. Or is this something for omelet? Hmmmm....
I honestly have no real suggestions and I would not be of much help. When you want a single purpose device, they are almost better off being your old system, and you're wiser for putting that money into a new system. When a system gets passed down a chain, you make more use of it due to being already familiar with it. But when it comes to laptops, people buy cheap laptops then act all shocked when they work like crap after a few years, or when the battery doesn't hold a charge. So those are rarely ever good systems to pass down a chain. A few netbooks have been amazing at staying durable, and a chromebook is a netbook. Netbooks have wifi, good battery, and they use specific CPUs designed for Ultraportables(which means the netbook is more than enough space for engineers to build more features into the purpose-designed chips. Chromebook might screw that up for everyone though, as it is trying to introduce a different OS into the mix, as well as use harder to scale hardware standards just because it is a custom linux using ultracheap components. Which also means, even if I'm wrong about Chromebooks in the future, you're going to have to deal with their impact on the landscape of what is available to buy now. So while you said you're not married to a chromebook, it is still going to be relevant, as many manufacturers of garbage budget systems(HP, some Acer) will make it hard for you to buy alternatives for a good price.
Does that make any sense? Personally, when I do minimal site maintaining, I'm using at least 3 programs up at one time. The text editor, a SSH client, and the browser itself. That is as low-end as it gets. Like nvan pointed out, you'll need gimp/photoshop at some point as well. Really, you don't need a lot of power to run graphic editing software, unless you want to do something complex. But multitasking and graphic editing is a lot more intensive(your sacrifice). Then we have the issue of deciding to use a WYSIWYG type editor for development, which uses more resources, FTP program if you don't use SSH, and if you use public networks, you'll want the power to run everything securely.
So yeah, on the outside, it seems like you don't need much, and you really don't. But the same can be said for going on a strict diet. You will want the screen space, and the compatibility. I would say consider more things, then see what is on the market, what you want to spend, and if you have questions, feel free to ask more.
Which leaves me at not giving you specific recommendations, just something to think over. Plus, I gotta jet. Good luck Monk.
