So, as you’ve doubtless already seen, the £250 Challenge is now in its final phase. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and rush out and buy the latest issue of PC Pro right now.

Because on pages 102-9 of issue 175 you’ll find complete specs for each of the five PCs in the challenge, along with the sorry tales of how we obtained them. You’ll also find an assessment of how well we all fared, in the judgment of our estimable editor, Mr Tim Danton.

But screw him; because the real judge, dear readers, is your good selves. Yes, ultimately it’s down to you to decide who wins the challenge. Will it be David Fearon, proud purchaser of the world’s most mediocre laptop? Seriously, they should call it the Acer Uninspired. Ha ha.

Or will you vote for Bayon, who didn’t even bother to choose his own PC? He just whinged about it in his blog until a kind reader went and found a suitable system for him. And, oops, he forgot to order a monitor, so here’s hoping he doesn’t want to, you know, see anything.

Perhaps you’ll vote for Stuart. His tale of goodwill does tend to renew one’s faith in human nature. Unfortunately, when you look at the PC he ended up with, it’s really not much of a gift. It’s one of those immense Compaq DeskPro systems from the turn of the millennium that occupies an entire desk and churns along at about two FLOPS. It might be fine if you just want to dash off a quick document in WordPerfect, or dial in to CompuServe; but it’s not much use if you actually want to party like it’s 2009.

Or, of course, you could vote for Mike’s… creation. You could. I mean, sure, it’s ugly. And noisy. And the front USB and audio ports don’t work. And there’s no monitor. And there’s not even a proper OS – just a Windows 7 beta that expires in August. Then again, given Jennings’ maniacal overclocking I don’t suppose his PC will last that long anyway.

But still, you could vote for Mike. Don’t let me stop you.

Ultimately, though, as all true Englishmen know, there’s only one winner: my glorious Compaq Presario. Sure, I had to go through some eBay shenanigans to buy it. Nothing worth the winning is achieved without effort.

But now I have a fast, fully-featured PC system. It boasts a full 2GB of RAM, a monitor, discrete graphics, speakers and even an all-in-one printer. It can run Vista without a hiccup; it can scan and print. It can play games. It can suck a cherry-pip through a straw. You know you want to vote for this.

Sure, the others will make mows about warranties. Let them. We all know that if a component’s going to fail, it’s overwhelmingly likely to do so within the first few weeks. Once a computer gets past that point, odds are it’ll keep going forever. And my PC has already had an extensive burn-in test, courtesy of its first owner. I’m not scared.

So come vote, and let’s bring the £250 Challenge to its grand, inevitable conclusion. All you have to do is fill out a short survey and select a winner (me) to be entered into a draw to win one of the four PCs in the contest (Stuart’s machine is disqualified because, let’s be honest, it’s no prize). And I’ll probably get a Mars bar or something.

You have your orders: now go! Fill in that survey… and vote!