This must be what it’s like when the camera pans to you at the Oscars, a second after the presenter has announced that the idiot with the stupid hair has won the award you craved. Unfortunately, I’m not a Hollywood starlet and, more importantly, I’m not the type to sit and smile and pretend it was the taking part that counts.

I wanted to win, dammit. And not because I’m a bad loser. Which I am. And not because the Goodwill PC deserved to win. Which it did. But because I wanted technology to be about more than baubles and flashing lights and faster bits of metal. I wanted to introduce a little soul to proceedings – not mine, of course, which is currently a seething mass of wronged rage – but somebody’s, hopefully somebody nice than me.

Before I begin heckling the world through a bottle of Bourbon, I best elaborate on the road that led us here. Back in January, tanktop-loving, bespectacled editor Tim Danton sent five of us into the world to see what kind of PC we could get with pittance in our pockets. My colleagues received £250 each and I received a pat on the back. My PC had to be free. What followed was the sort of disaster movie even Freddie Krueger would feel ashamed taking part in. You can find the full, gory details elsewhere, but know that I searched a canal infested with hobos and I’m not even a little bit ashamed.

I really, really wanted to win.

I didn’t win, though. And I didn’t win, because the computer I ultimately delivered before Tim, and yourselves, had all the charm of a broken bottle. It was slow, ugly and extremely heavy. None of which mattered. Somebody had give it to me for free. They’d done this out of the kindness of their heart, and they’d offered me a free Ubuntu lesson in the bargain. The computer may have been rubbish, but it introduced me to a world of free stuff (through Freecycle) and charity and being nice. None of which I’ve ever tried before.

The £250 came close to changing my fundamental nature. It didn’t because I’m horrible, but it tried. For that dedication to a futile dream it deserved to win. Not to mention the fact that all the other entries were plain rubbish. Told you I was a bad loser.

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.

Anybody who’s been following the travails of the GoodWill PC knows it’s been something of a rocky road. When I was first tasked with scrounging a PC for free I was full of hope, convinced that they were ten-a-penny and I need only flash an amiable smile at a stranger for heaven to open up and shower me with PC bits.

Turns out things weren’t quite that simple and until a few days ago I was convinced I was going to fail this challenge. This depressed me because if I failed the entire concept of human kindness, generosity and compassion failed with me. So you see, I wasn’t just scrounging free stuff, I was trying to prove us worthy of our place in the universe. I was providing a guidepost to the soul. Yes, really.

That we’re not all damned as pitiless husks is the work of one man. Steve. He posted an ad on FreeCycle for “a relatively old computer” and was then kind enough to let me have it. This, I must confess, wasn’t because I made the best case. It was because it was running Ubuntu and nobody else was interested. It seems Ubuntu inadvertently saved the human race. Glorious.

It arrived this morning and is everything you’d expect a free computer to be. It’s an old Compaq DeskPro, circa 1999, and runs a 266Mhz Pentium II backed with cheery incompetence by 280MB RAM, an ATI Rage Pro graphics card and 13.5GB of hard disk space. Using it is an exercise in patience, given the lag between deed and action. None of which matters, because performance isn’t remotely the point of this machine. 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 at all. You can. End of story.

Benchmarking it, comparing it to their dual-core PCs is irrelevant. If you’ve money to spend on a PC, you’re probably not looking on FreeCycle. Brilliantly though, unlike those £250 machines, if you’ve got a free PC you’re not paying for its flaws. Everything is a benefit which makes the Goodwill PC, by extension, the least disappointing computer I’ve ever owned. So thank you Steve and everybody else who helped, commentated and read. It’s been wild, but let’s never do it again.

The Goodwill PC will shortly be reappearing on FreeCycle. All good causes welcome.

Just for those who don’t know, I don’t have £250 to spend. I don’t have anything to spend. Not a sausage. Which is lucky because you can’t spend sausages and would look very silly trying. My task is to deliver a PC to Tim for free.

I wrote recently about my travails on sharing site Freecycle, but at the back of my mind I wasn’t panicking because I had a masterplan. I say masterplan. I had a dump. Not even a dump. The promise of a dump. I envisioned myself clambering over mountains of PC bits, snatching sticks of DDR3 RAM from toothless beggars – no idea why – and generally constructing a supercomputer from other people’s foolishly discarded detritus.

What I hadn’t counted on was bureaucracy. This morning I rang my local council to sort out my foraging trip, only to be told by a nice chap on the other end that once those lovely, if slightly broken, PCs pass the recycling centre gates they’re officially the property of the council. It’s illegal to remove them. The reasons are obvious. Under the wonderful WEEE directive, which was established to make sure electrical items are disposed of in an environmentally friendly way, the council can charge PC manufacturers for every item they recycle. If I took one away, they might as well open their wallet so I can steal a tenner.

It’s an interesting problem. WEEE is intended to encourage proper recycling, but the best kind of recycling is reuse, which it discourages with a financial motivation. All of which puts paid to my dump hopes needless to say. On the bright side, the nice chap from the council did offer some advice on where I might find a free PC… Freecycle. Brilliant.