My current laptop is dying on me after a good 6 years of constant use and my parents have already purchased me a new laptop. An acer chromebook 13 720p model with 2gb ram and nvdia k1. Due to arrive in about 2 weeks.
Honestly i don't game much away from home and i wouldn't be using a laptop outside of some form of wifi anyway.
I am a heavy user of all of google's services and use plenty of 'web apps' already. I spend most of my time away from gaming streaming music and browsing tech sites, tumblr etc.
To be honest anything is an upgrade over my current laptop and i'm not complaining. But will this mini laptop be good enough for me?
For we surfing and general office use, yes.
Many of the models you can install ful Linux on so you can have a full range of software.
Should be fine if you don't plan on doing much with it, however, for around the average cost of a chrome book you could get the lovable X200 convertible for around 150, the keyboard will be better than the chromebook but the battery life won't be there.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3TX1914718&cm_re=Netbook-_-9SIA3TX1914718-_-Product
The only other things I could suggest are these refurb asus netbooks, the first with an A4-1200 APU, 4W TDP that gets about 6 hours battery life with an SSD from my experience. It even runs civ 5 at around 20fps.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834231704
The second with a Celeron N2815 about 50% faster than the APU above, but I can't speak for the battery life.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232190
the benifit of the netbooks, besides windows 8, is the 4GBs of RAM they come with. They're around 220/240