What do you mean by "would the Lenovo work with an A8 or A10"? It has an Intel CPU (i5-4200m), not an AMD CPU.
Try being at a college/university with a decent number of students. When everybody is accessing the network, the network speed slows to a crawl a lot of the time. Plus, colleges usually have authentication for their network...and what if the authentication method is having issues (has happened several times at the college I went to where I worked as a student IT tech).
And what if your home internet is having issues? Depending on what ISP you have, they could be quite slow not to mention possibly have a datacap. Or worse - what if you live on campus in a dorm and the dorm internet was slowed to a snails pace when everybody is accessing it (like I mentioned above)?
IMO I just wouldn't trust it, especially after seeing how networks are run in a college environment. Get something that you can work offline on if necessary.
Yes you can install different linux distros on a Chromebook...but I've seen those be a hassle to setup as well.
