I search for a laptop.

This is not normally what I do, but I wonder if anybody could help me? I am not really a laptop expert and am floundering around totally out of my depth like some Patrick Kielty of portable technology. The last laptop I had was called an Osborne 1, but it didn’t have any USB sockets and they don’t make them any more and besides I need something with a bigger screen.

The problem seems to be that I don’t seem to want what other people think I should have. All I need is something that is small and light and that I can write things on using Microsoft Word (a word-processing package, it is quite popular) and access the Internet. I require neither my processors dualled nor my graphics accelerated, and on principle I’d shy away from something that wants to offer me ‘xclusiv ultim8 gaming action’ or the like.

The main thing is that it needs a nice keyboard. You can’t tell on the internet sites whether keyboards are tappity-tappy and robust, or something that Clive Sinclair would have laughed out of the factory as being too plasticky. I can only judge keyboards by going into somewhere like PC World and physically trying them, and I do not want to go into somewhere like PC World, as I do not want to get cross. For my purposes (writing things quickly) they keys need to go down when they’re pressed and make a satisfying thwacky noise that tells me that the character that I have just typed is definitely typed and will stay typed, even if I decide that I need to delete it at a later date.

Does anybody have any recommendations? I would be most grateful.