Good luck

An iPad might work for you. It's fine for surfing and reading. Writing is good. Kindle is good. Some kinds of work is fine.

You can use a wireless keyboard and mouse with it.

It does everything I need it to do. It's small enough to easily carry around and big enough to feel substantial.

Except for spilling some wine into the track pad, I've had no problems with it at all.

I used Open Office, a free program, and it has worked very well.

Macs are friendly, stable, easy to use but tend to cost more. But when I see my husband fighting with his computer and hear it having to reboot on a frequent basis, I am glad to have my Mac.

The Genius Bars in Apple stores are another real plus. You can easily make an appointment and they are very efficient and knowledgable. They also tend to be very consumer friendly, often offering free repairs or replacements if you are having significant problems.

If you go this route, you will have an adjustment period. While many functions are similar, some are quite different.

You might want to visit an Apple store and play with the laptops before you purchase.

It all depends on how you measure the cost. Their total cost of ownership over their useful lives is the measure I'm citing. They last a long time (because they always start out with the very latest high quality hardware). They need very few repairs. We still ahve our very first iMac, up and running every day. We use it just as a server for digital movies but the fact is it still works as well as it did on Day One.

Consider a MacBookAir 11". Consider a refurb. Well under $1K. Not as cheap as PC, but not terribly spendy. Just go to the Apple Store first to see if the small size is a bother to you. My wife has one and loves it. For me, the screen was too small. I have a 13" version and for me it is the perfect computer.

Good luck!

I have been servicing PCs for over 25 years.
If you want a SOLID computer, buy a Mac. Might I recommend the MacBook Pro 13" without retina, unless you watch a lot of movies and/or do a lot of photo editing.
They are solid, don't come with a lot of software that you will have to buy in 30 days, after you "try" it.

If you don't need a CD/DVD player, than go for the MacBook Air 13"

I have a 3 year old MacBook Pro 13 that I take to and from work each and every day. It has been banged up a little, but still runs quite well. The only thing is that the battery only lasts about 5 hours now. When it was new, it would last about 7 hours.

I have not had any trouble with it, and am going to convert my home network over to OSX as soon as all of the Windows machines die. As they die off, they will be replaced with Mac minis, and MacBook Pros. If I win the lottery, I will invest in one of the coolest servers, the Mac Pro.

You still need antivirus protection on a Mac, no matter what they tell you, and there are many excellent free packages out there.

OSX is not hard to learn, coming from Windows. Apple even has tutorials on their website that are very good.

I also figured out that headaches and down time is worth some money to me. You should consider that also.

But also needed the DVD writer. So we still got it without retina.

Replaced with a 13 inch MacBook Pro.

My 2008 MacBook still works pretty well - it serves as my backup/travel machine. (That's when I go on overseas flights or to big cities and don't feel like chancing it by taking my main laptop along). My main MacBook Pro is almost three years old and still works pretty well. (I did have to replace the hard drive last summer after the original one died on me. Got a 1TB drive). My brother got about 4.5 years out of his iBook before it stopped working - about one month before the first unibody MacBook Pros were introduced. His MBP is still working quite well at almost 5 1/2 years of age. He doesn't use it quite as much now that he has an iPad. He said if and when his MBP does give out he'll get something like a Mac Mini instead and just use his iPad when he's out and about.

At one time one needed to spend a bit of money to upgrade between major versions of OS X, but lately the cost has been minimal. The past two (Snow Leopard & Mavericks) upgrades have been free. Unlike Microsoft, where even an upgrade to 8.1 is close to $100, and to buy the full version starts out at $199.

...and it's snowing again...ugh

Sounds like you need an apple, lol.

Stay warm and dry.