Turns out yesterday’s fruitless visit to Dell wasn’t quite complete – I had only considered Dell’s consumer offerings. A quick jump to the business section took me straight to Dell’s cheapest Vostro PC, which at £211.60 including VAT and delivery is well within my price limit. So what else can I squeeze into the remaining £38.40?

It’s built around a Pentium Dual-Core E2200, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk and integrated graphics. My choices for affordable upgrades are:

• Vista Home Premium – add £20+VAT
• 2GB RAM – add £10+VAT
• from DVD-ROM to DVD-RW drive – add £20+VAT

As useful as it would be, I draw the line at paying more than £20 to upgrade to a DVD writer, so with the first two upgrades selected my new baseline system comes to £246.10 inc VAT and delivery.

So where should I go from here? My first thought would be to the PC manufacturers who send us the systems for our Labs but, being smaller companies focusing on custom builds, I very much doubt my budget will accomodate them. I’ll give them a try and see what I find, but I’m thinking the big supermarket-style retailers will be the best way forward.

So that’ll be sites such as PC World, Dixons, Tesco, et al, and this is where you come in. Have any of our readers bought one of these off-the-shelf PCs before? If so, who did you buy from? How was the ordering process? And most importantly, did the resulting PC do the job?

Being more of a build-your-own man myself, I’m heading blind into the depths of internet PC shopping, and any guidance would be much appreciated!