I have not run this for 10 hrs straight but I am sure it will be fine. I have run it for multiple hours with it sitting on my lap or the couch. so no room for breathing if you will and it has performed fine and the unit itself has not yet felt any where near the heat that a laptop does.

It is not upgrade but you won't need to upgrade it. 2GB is plenty for running what you need to on a system that doesn't run Windows. Since you're not running Windows you're getting rid of 90% of the bloat that usually comes with it and you can use a lower end device and still get decent performance. If you're concerned about the ram Acer does make a 4GB version of this same laptop. For 90% of people the 2GB version will be adequate. If you're someone who likes to work on a bunch of stuff at once spend the extra money for the 4GB version.

The whole idea behind this device is that you store your data in the cloud so you will not need a hard drive. You're not storing anything locally so you don't need a large hard drive. Your Chromebook will just download whatever you're working on during the duration that you're working on it. When you save it it saves back into the cloud. It's really nice because you could just throw your laptop off a bridge and it doesn't really matter because nothing is on it anyway. If someone steals it then it's just too bad for them because there's no data on it that can be stolen.

With that said the computer does support the ability to cache a file locally so that if you're working somewhere without internet access you can still edit a document or get other work done. It will then sync that work with the cloud the next time you connect to the internet.

Skype will not run on this computer. You can only run a program that you would be able to open within a Google Chrome web browser.

Instead of Skype I use Google Hangouts. I own a business and I prefer it over Skype as I'm always using it to meet with people both domestically and internationally. I usually get better video quality and greater reliability from my video calls using Google Hangouts. I highly recommend you switch from Skype regardless of whether or not you decide to purchase this device.

If you're willing to change your routine you will absolutely LOVE the Chromebook. I've recommended it to my friends and family and I have not found a person yet that doesn't like it. Some things like Skype will not run and you will just have to find more modern alternatives to those programs. In most cases those alternatives actually work much better than what you were using before.

You get 100 GB of Google Drive storage free for 2 years. After that, it will either go back down to the typical free 15 GB (with the potential of losing any data over 15 GB that you may have stored), or you can pay $1.99/month to continue 100 GB (not bad for $24/year, and better than most other cloud storage solutions). Here's the Google support page: https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en

No, wifi only.

Take your iPods power cord, plug it in the USB slot on your chrome laptop. If the connection process doesn't start and pop up on its own, click on the little icons in the right corner of your screen and the settings menu should come up and if it's connected it should available to open up.

Access Microsoft Office via OneDrive and your Live account. No need to pay for the subscription. You would work on Word, Excel and PowerPoint via the cloud.