So my job this fortnight, as you may have discovered in Tim’s call to arms, is to spend £250 of his money on a brand new fully-built PC or laptop, using only the medium of this interweb thingy. All phones off the hook, face-to-face conversation on hold; this is just me, my surfing skills and his wallet. Heaven.

My first port of call was obvious: Dell. Where better to find a rock-bottom bargain PC to make this whole task as easy as a few quick clicks, feet up on the desk and a delivery in the post room? Well, as you ask, quite a lot of places actually.

It turns out Dell’s configure-your-own shopping site is unintuitive, slow and not quite as rock-bottom as I thought. Rather than wade through the huge number of systems on offer, I went straight for the cheapest PC on Dell’s books, the Inspiron 530 Desktop PC. At £279 it was too dear, but I was confident there would be something I could remove from Dell’s pages and pages of customisation options.

Unfortunately, this being Dell’s most basic system, the options were already set to the cheapest available, with just two exceptions. I could remove the mouse for a hefty saving of, um, nothing, or I could jettison the bog-standard keyboard to shave slightly more from the price, as evidenced below.

I didn’t ask it to ‘Help me choose’.

Undeterred, I decided to take a different tack, and opened Dell’s excellent Live Chat facility which brings instant conversation with a Dell Sales Expert. Fired up by the possibility of a bit of bartering, I assumed a cunning pseudonym, connected with a helpful chap called Pradeep and began to pester. With an impressive lack of success.

Fair play to him, he got to the point. Asking for a discount on a £1,000 luxury system is one thing, having the nerve to do so on the cheapskate systems is another entirely.

Almost time to move on, but the visit to Dell’s online megastore wasn’t a total washout. My shortlist at least has its first provisional entry, in the form of the £249 Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbook. The only problem is it’ll take more than a fairly average netbook to beat whatever the others guys produce from their own hunting. A lot more. Onwards!