On my first trip to Akihabara, I initially stumbled into a number of small electrical shops that wouldn’t look out of place on London’s Tottenham Court Road. Some almost resemble market stalls, except that instead of selling bananas for a pound they want you to buy pocket translators and portable TVs.

If your wallet is tighter than the UK General Election, don’t get too excited. None of the prices made my jaw drop in wonder. Instead, what you get in Akihabara is choice. And at times, that choice is so overwhelming you may want to have a nice quiet sit down with a cup of green tea.

Your first choice is where to go. If the stalls and small shops don’t have what you want, then you’ll need to head to the larger streets where the big boys reside. These shops sprawl over a number of floors, each dedicated to a particular type of electronics: things like laptops, TVs, peripherals and games. But oh, there’s so much more.

Sofmap: my first mistake

After my first visit to Akihabara, I thought I’d found the area’s biggest store: a six-storey Sofmap shop on the main street, which puts PC World’s superstores to shame with its stunning array of goods, from PCs to digital cameras to those USB peripherals you never realised you wanted.

It also makes the shelves of PC World look terribly quiet and old-fashioned. Got a spare centimetre or two of wall space? Put a special offer there! Not used enough red and yellow on your posters? You’re fired!

The barrage of exclamation marks and bawdy colours is only matched by the sounds endlessly ramming into your ears – excited people gabbling on about the latest piece of technological wonderment, all matched by jingly tunes so horrendous even Pete Waterman would walk out of the shop.

What kept me there (and trust me, after 15 minutes of listening to the same music on a loop I wasn’t looking for reasons to stay) was the products. Not just all the tiny computers you expect to find in Japan, but the quirky ones. Two of my favourites include these:

That’s right, why put up with a boring old battery recharger when you can spend 2,980 Yen (that’s around £21 and $32) on one the shape of a dog? And surely the perfect gift for any computer lover is a doughnut-shaped cloth to wipe your screen clean? At 580 Yen, it’s a steal.

Yodobashi Akiba: the monster shop

What I hadn’t appreciated was that Sofmap’s six-storey store is but a tadpole to the blue whale tucked away at the Showa-dori exit of JR’s Akihabara station. (Confusingly, Tokyo’s metro isn’t really one network but a multitude, all of which co-exist separately yet also, on occasion, share stations. Wikipedia’s description of Tokyo’s transport system explains it about as well as anyone can.)

Yodobashi Akiba occupies nine storeys, which is in itself quite impressive. What’s truly impressive, however, is the size of each floor. Think aircraft hangar and you won’t be far wrong: in terms of sheer square footage, and for each floor remember, it’s about the same size as a large food superstore.

This allows it to dedicate aisles to products that any British retailer would squeeze into half a shelf. I turned one corner to be greeted by a whole section of laptop backpacks. (If you need such a thing, and you’re in Tokyo, then just head to second floor.)

Or perhaps you want an iPhone case. Or a book on Windows 7. Or a digital photo frame. In every case, Yodobashi Akiba has an incredible range from which to choose – and without the terrible music that plagues Sofmap.

That said, you will have to walk past a man shouting about the latest mobile phone offers if you happen to wander in near that entrance.

So, what’s so bewildering?

Throughout Tokyo, you’ll struggle to walk past an open shop without someone attempting to lure you by bellowing special offers into your ear – or at least that’s what I assume they’re shouting about, my Japanese stretching to “thank you”, “good morning” and “sorry for just knocking you over, I really didn’t mean to” – or thrusting a leaflet in your hand.

Akihabara is no different, and on the main street in particular you’ll find yourself passing pretty Japanese girls dressed in maid outfits. Not quite to the levels of  Carry On films, but sometimes not far off.

And, as I mentioned at the very top of this article, you can only navigate your way through the area with difficulty due to its size and sprawling “design”. Even though I’ve now been to Akihabara several times, I’m still not sure I’ve found all there is to find. Wander into a back street (such as in the photo below) and it still bustles with activity, while electrical shops abound at every turn.

The other type of shop it’s near impossible to avoid sells anime; often, floors and floors of anime books. Now, it may be tempting to buy a cartoon-laden book for a child, but flick through carefully: amidst the innocent-looking scenes you’ll suddenly find animations that would make an estate agent blush.

You might expect that such explicit images would make the books private reading, as such, but this isn’t the case. Hordes of young Japanese men can be found at all hours flicking through the books on display.

But I digress. The final thing to mention to anyone coming to Akihabara to buy electronic goods is think carefully before you buy. For one, browse the different shops, and even the different floors of the shops, before buying anything: prices vary quite notably from shop to shop. Note also that the display prices don’t usually include the 5% sales tax.

What caught me out in particular was buying with a credit card. In a rash moment, I bought some cables and a keyboard that I realised, back in the sanity of my hotel room, that I didn’t need.

Returning them proved a battle. At first I was told I couldn’t return them because I’d used a foreign credit card, and the exchange rates change on a daily basis. Having carried a keyboard with me into town, the thought of carrying it with me for the rest of the day led me to argue in a thoroughly un-British way.

Eventually, having seen the steely resolve in my eyes, the sales clerk muttered about the need for “special paperwork” before sending me away for 15 minutes. I returned, having practised my stern look in the store’s bathroom mirror for a while, and watched as he filled in this special document. It took about two minutes.

While you could see this as a consumer victory, I should point out that I’ll be stung by the extra credit-card charges: because I wasn’t returning everything that I’d bought, he had to refund the whole initial purchase and then recharge me for the goods I hadn’t returned.

Despite this less-than-convivial episode, Akihabara remains one of my favourite places in Tokyo. Going back to PC World won’t be a pleasant experience.

I’d had thoughts of building a media centre machine, but that plan is, at this point, dead in the water. To get that build into budget I found myself cutting too many corners: reducing the size of the hard disk, settling for an even worse chassis and not being able to include wireless internet, for instance, felt like removing too many crucial features to make it worthwhile.

So, that means my machine will be a good old-fashioned desktop PC, albeit one without a monitor or speakers. My final shopping list has been tweaked, pennies have been shaved off prices, and I’ve spent most of the week calculating delivery charges to work out if I save money by ordering from one site or if I’d be ruined by City Link.

My list of specifications is now complete, though, so you have until early afternoon to try and dissuade me from making a terrible mistake:

• Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 – £57.60
• ABIT I-45V motherboard – £25.53
• Asus Radeon HD 4670 graphics card – £63.36
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM – £15.99
• 250GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA II 7,200rpm 8MB cache – £33.08
• Samsung DVD+/-RW – £15.25
• Eye T Warrior Silver Gaming Case – £18.39
• Extra Value Multimedia keyboard – £3.42
• Extra Value optical mouse – £2.91

This leaves me with £3.75 spare cash out of my original £250 budget and, if I were being sensible, I’d save this money to help me out should anything go wrong with my machine. I’m not particularly sensible, though, and it seems that less than four quid won’t get me very far if I melt my CPU – so I’ve earmarked that money on anything I can buy that will keep the finished machine cool, quiet and tidy – so it might mean a single case fan or a pack of cable ties.

I’m now left with nothing more than an empty wallet and a head full of anticipation. My choices of delivery – super saver on every site I’ve used, basically – means that I’m not entirely sure when my components will arrive and in what order, so my excitement at getting to build this machine will have to wait until I get a fateful call from the post room.

Nevertheless, I’ll still be keeping busy. There’s plenty of Ubuntu-related research to carry out and a huge number of useful Open Source programs to download if I want to make my PC the best £250 Open Source machine it can be.

And, of course, it needs a name. I haven’t been able to come up with anything decent so, again, it’s over to you – if you think you have a certain phrase that captures the power, versatility and (probable) incompetence of my machine then please let me know – I’ll be forever grateful.