The latest w10 update reportedly requires 10gb of space!! On top of that, the new G Chrome update has apparently increased the cpu hawg factor.  Louise rarely opens her cheap travel laptop and the update stack bricked it.   I'll assign one of my old ones to travel duty, but will need to eventually replace it for convenience. I have others lying about, so there's no rush.

Given that 16g ram is the new reliability threshold, this limits the cheapest choices pretty quickly.  Lenovo, Dell, and HP seem to be the only brands that are coming up on Amz.

Added: It's GOT to run Tampermonkey.

How important is price? Portability/weight? Do you have a screen size in mind?

12-14" screen.  I like the mid-size laptops.  Not willing to pay for ultra-lightweight.  This a "daily reader" laptop, no hard processing (except some of my tampermonkey scripts, which can cause a second or two if lag). I can easily get by with a smallish drive, what I'm future-proofing is the ram.  I can find refurbs from the 3 above around $400.

Lenovo Thinkpad, Asus Vivobook and Dell Inspiron come to mind. 2-in-1 is nice for lap reading, if the machine is light.

I don't know anything about the refurb market, though.

>16g

That's just incredible to me.  MS should be ashamed.

You can still get by pretty well with 4g ram but I don't think it will go the distance.

The best deals are in 15" laptops since that is most popular.  The problem with the ultra thins is it's harder to add memory.  13" tended to be higher priced because they are duking it out with Macbooks.  14" had more choices over 13"

HP's are all over Amazon, I think they have a different model for every $10 increment.  I don't trust HP's quality.

I'm liking the build quality of this Asus.  The Lenovo and Dells looked good too. 

There were some deals on refurbs.

>CRAPbook

I bought an Acer r11 hybrid chromebook w/ 4g ram.  I've wanted to see how these perform for a while now. They supposedly run extensions AND android apps.  We'll see how tampermonkey runs.  If I don't like it, I'll give it to Louise for travel. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J42JPJG

Chromebooks run full desktop chrome which immediately synced with my W10 browser.  The major extensions, Scriptsafe, uBlock, Privacy Badger, Tampermonkey, and a few minor ones have been armed (by importing user files from W10 Chrome) and tested.

I'm moderately impressed.  Almost an ultralight. Fast, though not blazingly so.

Big drawback, might be fatal: I can't run Ultraedit. Yeah, there are plenty of chromebook text editors, but I can't find one with Column Mode other than -ugh- Vim.

Not sure if this will meet your needs

Sublime Text has a column selection mode (not all the features of Ultraedit column mode, so it depends on what you're doing with it) and Caret is an editor for Chromebook modeled on Sublime Text. Whether it has col selection, I don't know
http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/column_selection.html
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/caret/fljalecfjciodhpcledpamjachpmelml?hl=en

Warning: search on "column" came up empty

I had already installed Carat, and it is the one I'll keep for now. I've tried to find column mode but can't --will try again.


<added>
Nope, not that I could find.

It's quick, no doubt about it.  I'm seeing why the school teachers are raving about it.  Seems optimized for daily life on wifi.

USB keyboard & trackball work a-ok. USB device recognition seems especially quick.

OS + trimmings isn't a hawg, about 22g of 32g left after loading apps, extensions, etc.

The 4g hybrid with touchscreen is definitely the way to go. Thanks, reddit!

Moved to Acer Spin 311 chromebook with linux & full desktop Firefox.

> to find column mode

Atom text editor runs on linux *AND* has an add-on package for Column Mode. Got it working, woo hoo!

I used Atom for a while. Never could really commit though. On Linux, I've only recently switched from vim to nano! On Windows, mostly Notepad++ unless I need a full IDE with breakpoints and watches and all that.

Atom reminds me of Ultraedit ver 6, which was my all-time favorite.  I still need to see if it can do a find & replace for linebreaks and tabs.