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.

Even though I give Dell a bit of a hard time about the fact it’s even attempting to rival the likes of Amazon and iTunes in this week’s podcast, my biggest problem isn’t with the fact it’s offering a download service; it’s that it’s doing it so badly.

When a big company like Dell puts out a poor service like this – and I’m talking about the lack of choice of tracks, the fact that prices are often in Euros rather than pounds, and the fact that some links don’t actually work – it reflects badly on them.

I’m not saying for a moment that Dell shouldn’t have some sort of direct download offering; I can’t argue with the sentiment of its press release, which wisely points out Dell gets more than a million visitors to its site each day, so it kind of makes sense to try and sell them things over and above chunks of hardware.

But unlike a bricks-and-mortar shop, it’s all too easy for visitors to take a look at what’s on offer and compare it to what’s available from services that are geared up to selling music, movies and software.

Dell should be partnering with one of those companies – effectively offering them space on its website for a share of the returns – rather than a company that’s got no brand awareness for consumers (have you heard of Nexway?).

An Amazon shop on Dell.co.uk? Absolutely. A Dell Download Store that charges me £5.75 to re-download a piece of software I’ve already bought? No way.

It’s built around a Pentium Dual-Core E2200, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard disk and integrated graphics. My choices for affordable upgrades are:

• Vista Home Premium – add £20+VAT
• 2GB RAM – add £10+VAT
• from DVD-ROM to DVD-RW drive – add £20+VAT

As useful as it would be, I draw the line at paying more than £20 to upgrade to a DVD writer, so with the first two upgrades selected my new baseline system comes to £246.10 inc VAT and delivery.

So where should I go from here? My first thought would be to the PC manufacturers who send us the systems for our Labs but, being smaller companies focusing on custom builds, I very much doubt my budget will accomodate them. I’ll give them a try and see what I find, but I’m thinking the big supermarket-style retailers will be the best way forward.

So that’ll be sites such as PC World, Dixons, Tesco, et al, and this is where you come in. Have any of our readers bought one of these off-the-shelf PCs before? If so, who did you buy from? How was the ordering process? And most importantly, did the resulting PC do the job?

Being more of a build-your-own man myself, I’m heading blind into the depths of internet PC shopping, and any guidance would be much appreciated!

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!

Yet, the supermaket goliath joined Microsoft on the stage here at PDC in LA this week, to unveil a prototype shopping application that the company hopes will be launched by the second half of next year.

Although not a solely Windows 7 touch application – it works with a mouse/keyboard and XP/Vista too – the software gives a glimpse into how touchscreen PCs could be used in places like the kitchen, where there’s not always space for a mouse and keyboard.

The software acts as a message board, a calendar, a picture pinboard – and of course a place to do your online shopping without even thinking about it. Recipe and meal suggestions constantly pop-up, with the option to add ingredients to your shopping basket, simply by dragging and dropping them from one side of the screen to the other.

It’s hard to get a feel from these screenshots, but the software contains lots of nice 3D touches, such as the option to spin around birthday cakes with the flick a finger to take a look at the decoration on the back, and even the lift the cake out of the box. The feature that got the PDC crowd most animated was the integrated barcode scanner, which means you can wave your empty milk carton in front of your webcam and it will automatically be added to your shopping basket.

Tesco’s head of R&D, Nick Lansley, told me that the company is working with university students to port the application to the iPhone. He’s also not ruling out the possibility of building it into dedicated hardware. “We’re prepared to look at a special Tesco appliance,” he said, although pre-installing it on the PCs that Tesco already sells is a more likely option.

Lansley insists the supermarket won’t use it to track users’ shopping habits (at least, not any more than it does so already with its Clubcard scheme). But Tesco is opening up the APIs, so that partners can build thier own promotional widgets into the software. It makes cutting coupons out of the newspaper look so last century…