Should I get the toshiba chromebook or discontinued sony vaio?

[dkgrubby]

I am going back to college and what I mainly need is fast, easy to browse system and very portable. I have a strong gaming computer at home so just need something real cheap. The issue is I have two options

A) A toshiba chromebook 13 inch that I won.... got for 192 dollars total including shipping. The owner says its lightly used and he only had it for a month or two.

B) A discontinued model called Sony VAIO SVT13113FXS Ultrabook with Intel i5, Windows 7, and Webcam - Silver. I read some of the reviews and people say they get 5 hours on the laptop. Obviously this computer is alot more power, but I don't really need it since I will do all my main programming and stuff on my home computer. The catch however is this is a refurbished computer with 90 day warranty and its low as 115 dollars including shipping. I don't know much about discontinued laptops, so am iffy. Here is a quick run down of the system
- sony vaio is 13.3 inch screen, 1.7 ghz, 500 gb (will prob change to ssd if i get it, so consider plus 80 for a cheap ssd), windows xp, intel core i5, and 4gb of memory.

They are all pretty portable so what should I choose and why? I am trying to be real cheap as possible. I really care about the battery life and portable. I figure the charging pack that comes with the laptop will be very light. Keep in mind this will be my secondary computer that I will carry around campus and use in classes. What would you guys choose?

 

[hang-the-9]

Chomebook for about $200 is not such a great bargain. People are selling them all over the place same as the older netbooks because they are limited in what you can do with it.

Sony would be OK, also look for used Lenovo X201 systems, you can find them for the same $200 and maybe less than you got the Chromebook for which is interesting to have but you can't do much with it. Especially without an internet connection.

I am keeping an X200 laptop for my son to use when he starts getting into more classes that he needs a computer for, but that is way more usable than a Chrombook, although it's an older Core 2 Duo system, with an SSD drive and gig of RAM, it's easily fast enough to run anything outside of games on. Plus even with an SSD it's about $200.