My first port of call was obvious: Dell. Where better to find a rock-bottom bargain PC to make this whole task as easy as a few quick clicks, feet up on the desk and a delivery in the post room? Well, as you ask, quite a lot of places actually.

It turns out Dell’s configure-your-own shopping site is unintuitive, slow and not quite as rock-bottom as I thought. Rather than wade through the huge number of systems on offer, I went straight for the cheapest PC on Dell’s books, the Inspiron 530 Desktop PC. At £279 it was too dear, but I was confident there would be something I could remove from Dell’s pages and pages of customisation options.

Unfortunately, this being Dell’s most basic system, the options were already set to the cheapest available, with just two exceptions. I could remove the mouse for a hefty saving of, um, nothing, or I could jettison the bog-standard keyboard to shave slightly more from the price, as evidenced below.

I didn’t ask it to ‘Help me choose’.

Undeterred, I decided to take a different tack, and opened Dell’s excellent Live Chat facility which brings instant conversation with a Dell Sales Expert. Fired up by the possibility of a bit of bartering, I assumed a cunning pseudonym, connected with a helpful chap called Pradeep and began to pester. With an impressive lack of success.

Fair play to him, he got to the point. Asking for a discount on a £1,000 luxury system is one thing, having the nerve to do so on the cheapskate systems is another entirely.

Almost time to move on, but the visit to Dell’s online megastore wasn’t a total washout. My shortlist at least has its first provisional entry, in the form of the £249 Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbook. The only problem is it’ll take more than a fairly average netbook to beat whatever the others guys produce from their own hunting. A lot more. Onwards!

The excellent bits include, thankfully, both the 12in screen and the keyboard. The screen is sharp and glossy, much like that of the Inspiron Mini 9, but on this occasion Dell can squeeze in 1,280 x 800 pixels. That makes a huge difference when browsing websites, compared to the more cramped 1,024 x 600 resolution of typical netbooks.

I was also impressed by the keyboard, which is very nearly full width. There are no obvious sacrifices in terms of key height or placement, so those of us who pretend they can touch type will find it a pleasure to use.

Another plus is its low weight. You can pick the Mini 12 up by the corner and barely feel a strain, and it’s quite an achievement to make this large a laptop weigh just 1.2kg. One sacrifice is battery size, and you’ll be fortunate to get over two hours from it, but larger batteries will be available.

The chassis itself is quite a basic affair. It feels plasticky because, well, it is plastic, and Dell (like every other major laptop manufacturer) is keen to make it clear from the no-thrills design that this is a basic machine, not a rival to a full-blown Inspiron.

Unfortunately, the basicness became even more obvious once Windows Vista started loading. I waited a good minute for the Mini 12 to boot up, and even then it was clanking through third-party “extras” that were slowing it down. I’m fully aware of why Dell pre-loaded Google Desktop onto this machine (a thick wedge of dollars from Google), but it appears to cripple its performance.

Admittedly, this could be in large part due to the choice of Vista over XP, and note that it’s just Vista Home Basic. The slow speeds are also partially due to the 1GB rather than 2GB of RAM.

So I have my reservations about the Mini 12, and I certainly wouldn’t order it with Vista installed, but as a lightweight, big-screened machine to type on it could well prove to be the bargain of 2009. I look forward to getting a final production model to put it through our benchmarks.