I'm a novelist with a bad back, and need something more portable than my perfectly functional laptop for working on my manuscripts away from home. Netbooks are dead; Ultrabooks are expensive; Chromebooks defeat the object, because all I need is to work in, and save frequently on, Microsoft Word – no touchscreens and, probably, no cloud.
Charlotte

You don't mention a budget, but is £350 too much? At the moment I'd go for an Asus VivoBook S200 with an 11.6in screen for £349.97. This gets you a PC that is about the size and weight of a netbook but with a much better specification. It includes an Intel Pentium processor, 4GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive, VGA (D-SUB) and HDMI video ports, two USB 2 ports, one USB 3 port, an SD card slot and an Ethernet port.

The VivoBook S200SE comes loaded with Microsoft Windows 8, which will soon get a free upgrade to Windows 8.1. As you say, you don't really need a touch-sensitive screen, but it is an advantage when using Windows 8's "modern" (formerly Metro) apps downloaded from the Windows Store.

Even better, go for VivoBook S200E, which is essentially the same machine with an Intel Core i3 processor. This increases the price by £37.90 to £387.87, but provides a worthwhile increase in performance. For completeness, you can also get the S200E with a much slower 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor and a smaller, 320GB hard drive for £329 from Tesco Direct. However, it's really not worth saving £21...