How well can this netbook handle crunchbang linux?

Hard to tell (especially because I have never used crunchbang) but I installed Ubuntu on my ancient latop a year ago. It had similar ram and cpu speed and ran fairly well. And as for battery life I couldn't really tell you. (If you decide to spend more consider an ASUS 1015, great battery life and ubuntu installs flawlessly. Ubuntu and Crunchbang both are debian based so I imagine you would have a similar experience.)