Hello.  There really is no way to know what you're getting with a mail-order laptop.  Also, the big box stores aren't going to be beaten by much on the price of a large item like that, they over-price small stuff but are pretty competitive on the big stuff.  Mail-order laptops aren't really worth the risk.


Now, as far as what you're dealing with, I've spent a lot of time in the last year looking at laptop keyboards.  There are generally other ways to do what you need to do.  For your home end, page up and page down, try holding down the fn key (usually it is either the left most key on the bottom row, or it is the second from the left and using the arrow keys.  On my laptop there is also a special combination for the applications key, I believe it is fn plus the key just to the left of the separate arrows.  You can always fall back on the applications combination that was around before the separate key, that was shift-f10.



Another sweet litttle trick manufacturers do is to make the up and down arrows as half-height keys, HP seems to like that one. The best keyboard I saw all year comes from Asus, and if I had to buy a laptop right now, I'd start looking there.