New PC recommendations

A lot depends on your price point. What's the approx budget for this laptop? Most tech websites are running holiday sales right now so it's a good time to shop.

I'm probably going to wait until after the holidays for those sales.

My price point is as little as possible but up to around $1200. (I have been looking at the Surface 4.)

I use to own Dells but stopped after getting terrible service. I'll take a look at them again.

I love my Acer Aspire One netbook but they don't sell them anymore as far as I know. They have a 13" that has lots of bells and whistles. Not sure how heavy it is but it would certainly do the trick for what you want to use it for. Never had to experience any customer service issues with my Acer because it's never given me any trouble in 5 years and two long trips to Europe.

I have been looking at this too, because the hard drive died on my seven-year-old my MacBook Pro. Right now I am using a Lenovo ThinkPad that was given to me a couple of years back as a bridging strategy until I figure out what to do. I have always liked the ThinkPad pointing device, it's way better than a track pad once you get the hang of it and no external mouse is needed. I think the quality of the Lenovos is very good and they are worth a look. One advantage of Windows laptops is that they come with touchscreen. I am having a hard time justifying the price of a new MacBook Pro, as much as I love Apple, given that I have a perfectly good Windows PC to work with. Plus the 13" screen is a downgrade from the 15" that I am used to (15" is even pricier). Having researched this, I suggest that you get 8GB RAM and 256 GB solid state drive. RAM is the think that will end up being a performance bottleneck down the road. The solid state drives provide a major performance boost too, they are really fast. In five years tablets and laptops will have converged, even though the Surface is close I don't think we are quite there yet. I think the Surface is great, just not quite ready to take that plunge myself yet. Depending upon what you want to do with it, it could work for you though.

any of these would fit your criteria

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/laptops/best-ultrabook-18-top-thin-and-lights-1054355

for the price the Asus zenbooks are good value

yes get 8GB RAM and an SSD

I have to add a second on the Dell 13 XPS. I carried one with me on a 3 week trip to Myanmar. Worked great and the 3 lb weight can not be beat for a full service PC.

After years of travelling with ever smaller Acer laptops, I switched to Apple MacBook Air and have had no issues. But I carry a small Western Digital external hard drive and back up constantly in case of theft or incidents.now Airport security has the ability to scramble photo folders, for example. I notice that many young Europeans are using tablets by Samsung, etc.. My wife uses an iPad with a Zygo keyboard and stand...The iPad Pro looks amazing, but a tad bulky for travel.

Frank II,

Perhaps one of these would fit the bill.....

http://www.toptenreviews.com/computers/laptops/best-netbooks/

Although I'm a diehard Apple user, my travel computer is a Toshiba Netbook (Windows 7) and it's always worked well. It's an older generation so the Atom processor is under powered and a bit frustrating at times, but I can tolerate that. I'm sure the newer generations are much better in that regard.

I just use it for web browsing, E-mail, journaling my trips (via MS Office) and photo backup, so it doesn't need a lot of processing power. One advantage of the under powered CPU is that it has great battery life.

I'm currently using a Lenovo "notebook", my first was an MSI. I'm limited by what's available here. I'm sure in the U.S. there are more options for similar items.

Just like a "regular" PC laptop (I grew up on Windows, so Apple-based stuff drives me crazy - including my iPod touch), but smaller, lighter, and with fewer ports - you may need a multi-port USB, especially if you're using a mouse. Both have been about as fast as my Dell desktop - I don't do much streaming, which may be slower. My current one weighs just over 1 kg, and has a touch screen, 4 GB DDR3 memory, 500 GB hard drive. Mine's almost 2 years old, I'll bet today you can get more RAM, bigger hard drive and faster graphics for the same price - under $500.

I keep all my travel docs (Windows Office), pdf's etc. on it, use it for email, web-surfing, and especially as a daily back-up of my photos (I use an SD card reader flash drive - another reason for a multi-port USB). The only thing that I can't do because of the small screen is edit my photos.

Dell Outlet. I love mine that I purchased last summer.

Ken @ Vernon, I still use an HP Mini netbook with single atom core cpu. I like to take it on trips because it is light, does the job and is so old that i would not care if it was stolen. I put in an extra stick of ram which helped marginally with speed. The best upgrade was a cheap SSD drive which made it substantially faster. My previous hard drive in the HP had crashed so i was forced to get the ssd for the netbook. The current prices for ssd are quite affordable, so i just cloned and swapped in an ssd into my ASUS work laptop. It is much faster now. And it has improved the battery life.

For OP, i can attest to quality of ASUS ultrabooks. The form factor is very similar to Macbook Air. If you get any Windows 10 notebook, i would recommend you find one with an SSD already included. The speed and battery life is worth it. ASUS, HP, Acer, Dell are all good, imo. You can find models with the same specs/performance. Then is just comes to price and looks.

My son just got a Surface Pro 4 and he likes it a lot. He can use it to study and take notes using the surface pen, He bought it directly from the Microsoft Store during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Prices are way back up now. Personally, for the price, i would have preferred a Macbook Air over the SP4. I would expect price drop after Christmas and in the new year. The Surface Pro 5 will be coming out early next year so i would expect the 4 to be discounted then.

We also have an old ipad 3. I found getting a logitech keyboard made it a more productive work device. However, i do not kow anything about website editing on either platform. I still prefer netbook over ipad for travelling because it take a lot of photos and i can transfer photos to the netbook much more easily for backup and editing. Also, it is less likely to be stolen.

When travelling, I make sure that I have a laptop that I can bring anywhere, not the bulky one. Since I used to travel because of my work, aside from my working laptop, I decided to buy a netbook which has 11inch size. Got this Samsung Chromebook 2 11.6 Inch Laptop which has almost the same performance as my Acer Laptop does. The only difference is the screen, but for me, this doesn't matter as long as I can carry my netbook anywhere. You can check at http://www.laptoprunner.com/best-netbook/ and see what fits for your needs. :)