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!

Now, finally, in the luxurious splendour of Monte-Carlo’s Fairmont Hotel, we’ve managed to get our grubby mitts on the Mini 9 itself.

The 9 in the title gives away the most important part of its specification. The screen is an 8.9in panel, which looked bright and vibrant, while boasting the usual 1,204 x 600 pixel resolution.

Unlike the rest of Dell’s brightly-coloured new ranges, the Inpiron Mini 9 is finished in a rather dour grey and black attire. The glossy black lid looks nice enough, even if it is a bit of a fingerprint magnet, and build quality generally feels pretty sturdy. Compared to the likes of MSI’s Wind, the lid and chassis feel just that bit more reassuringly stiff, and it seems like it’ll survive the daily rigours of being thrown in a bag.

The version we saw came with the popular Ubuntu 8.04 installed as standard. And while the specification list is the standard netbook fare – an Intel Atom N270 running at 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM and 8GB of solid-state disk -  startup was a touch on the sluggish side, taking a good 45 seconds before Ubuntu showed its face.

But, more crucially, we weren’t especially enamoured with the keyboard. Dell has opted to keep the letter keys as large as possible, while shrinking the surrounding ones, a choice which leaves the Tab, Shift, Caps Lock and other keys looking painfully small.

It’s a shame, as there’s a good 8/9mm of chassis to the left and right of the keyboard which has been inexplicably left fallow. In our brief encounter, we preferred it to that of Asus’s original 8.9″ models, but it was a far cry from the delightful ergonomics of MSI’s Wind, Asus’ Eee PC 1000 or Acer’s Aspire One.

Dell is offering two versions, the one seen here with Ubuntu for £269, and another with Windows XP for £299. HSDPA/3G will initially only be available on Mini 9s bought directly through Vodafone, but Dell’s reps didn’t rule out the possibility of HSDPA-equipped models becoming available in the future. And when we pressed them about other models in the range, such as the 12.1in Intel Atom Z530-powered model accidentally leaked by Tesco, they admitted that the company will be expanding the range in the not too distant future.

In the meantime, we’ll leave you with some shots of the Mini 9’s shapely sides to drool over…