[plug] Recommendations for a laptop

[Brad Campbell]

G'day all,

After using my laptop as a fuse between a power meter I was debugging, 
and the mains I find myself in need of a replacement.

My laptop was a Sony Vaio TT, and its predecessor a TX so I'm used to 
small (11.1"), light (<1200g) and 6-11 hours of battery.

I've been looking at a 13" Mac Air, but I wonder if anyone else has 
recommendations for a small and light linux suitable machine with a 
10-12 hour battery life (or >6 hours with a replaceable battery).

The Vaio was 1366x768 ~1.2ghz Core 2, 8gb ram and 160gb Intel SSD. Ran 
for 6 hours on the standard battery and 11 on the extended.

Recommendations of suitable machines that cost less than the Mac and 
have at least feature parity with the VAIO would be very warmly 
welcomed. I write code on it, so it needs to be an x86_64 and it really 
does need at least 160GB SSD.