I’ll hold my hands up – the free PC I acquired as part of the £250 challenge is ugly. It’s so ugly children can’t actually see it and every adult who’s dared peer in its direction has been driven mad. I wouldn’t be surprised if the devil lived inside. It’s big enough. There’d even be room for Cerberus to have a run around.

I could have delivered it to the office in Noah’s Ark while sharing a beer with Elvis Presley and it wouldn’t have caused more of a stir. People were drawn to it.  They crept from behind their desks and gathered around it with bewildered expressions. I’d like to believe it was because I’d discovered a relic, that my technological archaeology had unearthed an ancient fascination. It was built in 1999 after all. The truth is much simpler. It’s monstrous.

We tend to look at our past with rose coloured spectacles, I’ve done it myself. The Compaq Deskpro was the heel which ground those spectacles into the dirt. As a PC it has no redeeming features. Aside from its cheery ugliness, it’s also big enough to beat a whale to death and has the processing power of a twelve-year-old who’s spent the last hour trying to stick a banana in his ear.

Thankfully, my part of the challenge has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the PC I found. While my colleagues were running around trying to get the best machine they could for £250, my task was to prove you could get one for free. You can. End of story… or at lest, that’s what I thought.

In the process of rooting out free stuff I encountered so many nice people willing to do nice things for no other reason than because they were nice, that even my cynical, shrivelled soul was reborn. People are ace. The best part of my free PC was not the free PC, but the moment when the guy who gave it to me offered an accompanying Linux lesson – just so I didn’t come unstuck by the operating system it was running.

The high street laptop, the first hand, second hand and self builds are all better machines. This is a fact. They’re also incredibly soulless stories and while the boys did brilliantly to get them I very much doubt they had any fun – this last point excludes Mike of course. Mike, it should be noted, is the most enthusiastic man on the planet and would thoroughly enjoy a room with all the oxygen rushing out because it was making a funny sound.

Weeks after the £250 challenge came to an end I’m still getting letters and phonecalls from readers pointing me towards free stuff, or lambasting me for my ineptiude on FreeCycle. People care about this stuff, and these sites. And now so do I. So much so that my old 17in monitor is about to make an appearance on FreeCycle.

When was the last time you remember the pursuit of a computer being anything more than a grim trawl through familiar sites? In rooting out my free PC I met people who changed the way I think about things, and that’s so unusual it deserves to be celebrated. You can do that by voting for me and proving that IT isn’t always about specs and designs and warranties. It’s about people. And people are brilliant.

If you’re fortunate enough to be living in the UK, you can pick up the latest issue of PC Pro – complete with The £250 Challenge feature – at any good newsagent until the 15th of April. This month’s issue also includes group tests on laptops from as little as £304 (the “netbook killers” shown on the front), motherboards and over 50 CPUs. Other highlights include a guide to setting up a no-risk web business and our step-by-step guide to exploring the stars from your PC.