Why was I fooled? For one, it actually had my name in the email, and for another we as a magazine have been focusing on eBay for the last month or two as part of the investigative cover feature that adorns the current issue (eBay exposed). Could it be some sort of malicious attack from an eBay devotee, a paranoid part of my mind wondered?

So, with a deal of trepidation, I pressed the link – and was impressed to see how effective the combination of Mozilla Firefox and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor service is.

A huge red flash appeared in my browser window warning me that this site was considered to be a “web forgery”, and then I was auto-forwarded me to the SiteAdvisor page with the full description of its perils.

It’s a beautifully efficient system that just works, and if we’ve learnt anything from the McColo affair (where, after a big prosecution that took down US-based ISP McColo, spam fell by as much as 40% only to return to historic levels a matter of weeks later) it’s that cutting off the botnets doesn’t work – they’ll simply reappear.

You need to get rid of the commercial incentive of spam – and admittedly I’m talking “merely” about phishing-based spam here – which to my mind means integrating SiteAdvisor into every web browser out there. And updating to the latest web browser, not sticking with an old one out of habit or laziness.

In the meantime, if you haven’t, head over to the official SiteAdvisor site now for the free download.

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!

If you look closely (click on the picture for a larger view), you may notice that it didn’t actually arrive in pristine condition. The box was clearly battered and crushed in transit, developing a big split up the side through which the contents could easily have fallen out.

Of course, parcels get squished and thrown about all the time. That’s why commercial PC retailers encase their systems in weapons-grade polystyrene before allowing them anywhere near a courier.

But when you buy on eBay, you leave the safe dispatch of your goods in the hands of an individual – an individual who may naively imagine that the kindly lady at the Post Office will ensure no harm comes to their lovingly-packaged item.

The breakable truth

As those of us who send and receive PC’s every day know, the sad reality is that even as you skip happily out the door, that kindly lady is handing your parcel to a lorry-driving wideboy to whom it is a matter of utter indifference whether your parcel arrives intact, or at all. Go ahead, write “FRAGILE” on the box – it’ll still just get chucked in the back of the van with all the other fragile boxes.

Maybe I’m being unfair. You get the service you pay for, and if we were really serious about things like “THIS WAY UP” and “DO NOT BEND” we’d pay for our packages to go by taxi. We don’t, for the same reason we take the tube ourselves.

But as I say, the man in the street probably doesn’t appreciate just how much protection a PC system needs if it’s to survive the ordeal of parcel post. And even if he does, he’s unlikely to have the right materials to hand. My seller conscientiously surrounded my PC in rolls and rolls of bubble-wrap, which did nothing whatsoever for the structural integrity of the box.

In the end, there’s no one really to blame for this: it’s just an unhappy disjoint between our (not unreasonable) expectations of parcel delivery, and the (not unreasonable) reality.

But it is, very clearly, just one more reason to keep your fingers firmly crossed when you buy from eBay.

But getting to this stage has been a monumental hassle – far more so than I’d anticipated. When I volunteered for the £250 Challenge I thought buying second-hand would be easy: just scout around the various classified and auction sites, visit the local second-hand shops, draw up a shortlist, fire off a few emails, bish bash bosh, job done.

eBay the better

My first reality check came when I discovered the extent to which the second-hand market has coalesced around eBay. It’s not the only game in town – Gumtree and Craigslist are obvious alternatives, and after my last post some of you kindly directed me to sites specialising in refurbished and overstock machines, such as IT Auctions and ITClear. But next to the thousands of systems on eBay their listings look very sparse. And while High Street shops like Computer Exchange offer instant gratification, their stock is generally even more limited.

There’s one obvious reason for eBay’s dominance: having got into the game early, eBay has benefited hugely from the network effect. Buyers go to eBay because that’s where the sellers are, and vice versa. But it’s not just the range of items that makes it a winner: as I browsed around I quickly found that eBay’s search templates and filters made it easy to drill down to the products I was interested in, while other sites left me browsing through irrelevant ads.

Plus, when I found an eBay listing I liked, I felt confident the item was still available, which is more than I could say for the week-old classifieds that turned up on other sites. In short order, the clarity and convenience of eBay won me over.

Auction stations

But eBay wasn’t a perfect solution. The first problem I hit was that with auction-type sales it’s almost impossible to stick to a budget. When I placed bids on systems close to £250, the price inevitably crept over my limit and someone else ended up winning the auction. If I focused on cheaper systems I ran the risk of paying over the odds for a clapped-out old banger of a PC.

And of course, when you lose an auction you’re left simply waiting around for another suitable one to conclude, which is a huge waste of time. I wrote off much of Friday and most of my Saturday trying (in vain) to sneak a bargain under the hammer, before giving up on auctions altogether and switching my attention to the “Buy It Now” listings.

We want it now

This brought its own complications. Though eBay is best known as a site for private sales, it also hosts tens of thousands of “eBay shops”, through which back-room merchants peddle refurbished and custom-built PCs (and other goods), normally on a fixed-price basis.

There’s no particular harm in buying from a reseller like this – indeed, they may well be more knowledgeable and organised than your John Smiths looking to make a few quid off their old Packard Bell. But for me to do so would hardly be within the spirit of the £250 Challenge… so once I switched to “Buy It Now” I was left wading through thousands of commercial listings trying to find a bona fide individual from whom to buy my system.

Sell me lies

On the way, incidentally, I noticed a shocking amount of flagrant mis-selling, normally from unscrupulous resellers looking to take advantage of ill-informed shoppers. A favourite trick was to multiply the processor speed by the number of cores, so a 3GHz Core 2 Duo would be advertised as a 6GHz CPU (indeed, I saw several Phenom systems advertised with a remarkable clock speed of 10.4GHz). Base systems would often be advertised with a photo showing a large TFT monitor. Other product images were superimposed with bogus awards or company logos. I noted several unauthorised uses of the PC Pro masthead and award logos, none of them relating to products we’ve actually endorsed.

And when I did find an honest-to-goodness private seller, the item was all too often listed as “collection only” – raising the effective price and throwing a side order of inconvenience into the bargain (unless you’re lucky enough to live next door to the seller, which isn’t likely). Most annoyingly of all, several advertisers thought this constituted “free delivery”, and advertised their items accordingly.

Time, time, time… see what’s become of me

Eventually, at mid-morning on Sunday, I found a system that had a reasonable specification, at the right price, from a seller who was willing to deliver. Needless to say, I leapt at it. The transaction itself went smoothly, and, assuming the seller is as good as his word, it should be with me later this week. Looking across at the systems David Bayon and Mike Jennings are putting together, I think it might measure up rather well.

But though it looks like my tale has a happy ending, it came at quite a cost. Before you start scouring eBay for your next computer, remember just how many hours I ended up sinking in pursuit of a system that was right for me. You’ve heard the old canard about Linux: they say it’s a great way to save money, so long as you don’t value your time. Well, the same applies, with knobs on, to buying a second-hand PC.

The precise source is up to me: I can scour classified ads, place bids on auction sites or even try to persuade David Fearon to sell me one of his cast-offs. But the PC I buy has to be pre-loved, and it has to come in at £250 or less.

I admit, it’s not an approach I’ve tried before. Being by nature an impatient sod, my usual purchasing strategy is simply to march into a shop and slap down a credit card. This will, I suspect, be a learning experience for me.

But that doesn’t mean I have to go into it completely blind. So, dear readers: what should I be looking out for? Share the benefits of your experience, and tell me your tips and warnings.

Otherwise, on my first foray into the second-hand arena, I’ve every chance of getting screwed around and ripped off. And you wouldn’t want to see that, would you?

We’re in a knowledge economy now, so I’m told. Unfortunately, capitalising on knowledge can be hard. Just because you know exactly how many episodes of the Simpsons each and every periphery character appears in, doesn’t mean that it’s going to earn you any money. Similarly, being able to list the ten most common colours that cars from 1993 were bought in isn’t going to pay for that swimming pool you hanker after.

A new website intends to change all that by becoming a kind of eBay for information. Just as the original auction site allowed you to turn the old junk clogging up your attic into cash, Doxmart will let you flog all those Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, images, videos, thoughts and ideas that fill up your brain and hard disk.

The idea is that you create an account and upload a file, whatever it may be, tagging it well. Then, the next time that someone needs that exact collection of arbitrary data, they may choose to pay a small fee for it rather than spend a few hours researching it themselves. You keep most of this money, Doxmart takes a little, and everyone wins.

It’s a wonderful idea – transcribing the knowledge that you’ve spent years collecting into an easily consumable digital package, and spending the rest of your life comfortably living off of the revenue. The reality of this depends entirely of the worth of the knowledge you have stored up there. Experts in highly advanced and specialised fields may well make a mint, whereas that Simpsons knowledge may struggle to earn you enough to buy a pint once a year. Only time will tell, once the site emerges in a Beta state in September.

One interesting aspect is that if you refer users you get to take 4% of the revenue from their documents – out of Doxmart’s share – forever. That means that if a cure for the common cold, award-winning novel, best-selling album or scandalous photograph of Gordon Brown is uploaded by someone following this link, I can retire early.

Oops.

While it does look pretty bad, it’s not clear at which end the mistake was made. Surely the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) should have renamed the file and deleted the tag to retain Google’s anonymity before it hit the web – not after someone had spotted the mistake and removed it later. A case of the door being slammed shut after the horse has bolted, lived a full life and then passed away. if anything. There also must be someone at among the free snack machines, table football and grand pianos who could have piped up and raised the obvious issue: putting the word ‘Google’ in the filename would rid the document of any sort of anonymity that Google craved.

While it could be debated that both sides are responsible for the leak of the 38-page document’s origin, there’s no doubting that the scenario raises plenty of questions and will, no doubt, stir a variety of opinions – not least in the circles of disgruntled eBay veterans who don’t want to be tied down to Paypal, simply because eBay owns the financial transaction giant. It’s akin to Tesco buying up HSBC and only allowing customers to pay using HSBC bank accounts – and I’m sure that, if that hypothetical situation were to come to fruition, our own Competition Commission would have plenty to say about it.

It seems odd that eBay should be allowed to force its customers to use Paypal at all. Sure, they could use alternative auction sites if they objected to this policy – but what are they? I certainly can’t name any that can even approach the magnitude of eBay.

I’ve read plenty of complaints regarding Paypal and, personally, I try to use alternative forms of payment whenever I can – often, I find sending a cheque in the post is my preferred option. The coverage of this story on Slashdot certainly has its fair share of comments from users angry about potentially having to use Paypal when they’ve had bad experiences in the past. There’s even an active community of anti-Paypal loyalists gathered at Paypalsucks.com.

I’m convinced that it’s not healthy for eBay to restrict users to using Paypal – it’s beneficial to the two organisations, of course, as they both take extra cash from transations made using Paypal. Conversely, it’s awful for customers, robbing them of choice and forcing their hand to a service they may not prefer. It’d make a refreshing change for a company to put its customers first but, even with veritable corporate newcomers like eBay and Paypal, this seems not to be the case.

However, it makes sense for Google to try and hide their considerable clout behind an anonymous complaint – one of a few that have been left nameless among thousands of protests on the ACCC website. Ebay famously halted its advertising on Google AdWords after Google protested about eBay’s refusal to allow users to use Google’s Checkout software – which directly competes with Paypal.

Despite this, though, I’m not sure that plumping for anonymity was the right thing for Google to do. Among the small organisations and individuals protesting about the financial monopoly that eBay are proposing, the huge draw of Google joining forces with them could have had, potentially, a serious impact. Ebay are proposing to trial the Paypal-only restrictions in Australia before launching it across the world: the objection of a truly global company in a public forum could have had an impact that would benefit the millions of disgruntled eBay users instead of the largely faceless coroporations – and convinced other businesses and interested parties to raise their heads above the parapet to voice their objections, too.

Instead, the situation has taken a turn for the farcical: Google have been exposed in a way that they really wouldn’t have liked, and their objection to the plans has suddenly, in my eyes, lost a bit of credibility. Apparently Google are thinking of launching Checkout in Australia as a direct competitor to Paypal – and so can’t face losing the support of eBay if they want to be successful. It’s a huge ulterior motive, sure, and smacks of self-interest in a similar way to eBay’s behaviour.

Hopefully, the situation will be resolved in such a way that some competition and choice remains in the marketplace. I know I’ll certainly be less included to use eBay if I’m forced to rely on Paypal and, judging by the variety of internet responses, plenty of people feel the same way. It’s just not fair on the millions of consumers – the people who keep eBay alive – to force them to use what they consider to be an inferior system. Let’s hope that the objection of Google, however it was exposed, can force eBay to see sense – and please the multitude of angry customers rather than ignoring them completely.