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.

I’d had thoughts of building a media centre machine, but that plan is, at this point, dead in the water. To get that build into budget I found myself cutting too many corners: reducing the size of the hard disk, settling for an even worse chassis and not being able to include wireless internet, for instance, felt like removing too many crucial features to make it worthwhile.

So, that means my machine will be a good old-fashioned desktop PC, albeit one without a monitor or speakers. My final shopping list has been tweaked, pennies have been shaved off prices, and I’ve spent most of the week calculating delivery charges to work out if I save money by ordering from one site or if I’d be ruined by City Link.

My list of specifications is now complete, though, so you have until early afternoon to try and dissuade me from making a terrible mistake:

• Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 – £57.60
• ABIT I-45V motherboard – £25.53
• Asus Radeon HD 4670 graphics card – £63.36
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM – £15.99
• 250GB Hitachi Deskstar SATA II 7,200rpm 8MB cache – £33.08
• Samsung DVD+/-RW – £15.25
• Eye T Warrior Silver Gaming Case – £18.39
• Extra Value Multimedia keyboard – £3.42
• Extra Value optical mouse – £2.91

This leaves me with £3.75 spare cash out of my original £250 budget and, if I were being sensible, I’d save this money to help me out should anything go wrong with my machine. I’m not particularly sensible, though, and it seems that less than four quid won’t get me very far if I melt my CPU – so I’ve earmarked that money on anything I can buy that will keep the finished machine cool, quiet and tidy – so it might mean a single case fan or a pack of cable ties.

I’m now left with nothing more than an empty wallet and a head full of anticipation. My choices of delivery – super saver on every site I’ve used, basically – means that I’m not entirely sure when my components will arrive and in what order, so my excitement at getting to build this machine will have to wait until I get a fateful call from the post room.

Nevertheless, I’ll still be keeping busy. There’s plenty of Ubuntu-related research to carry out and a huge number of useful Open Source programs to download if I want to make my PC the best £250 Open Source machine it can be.

And, of course, it needs a name. I haven’t been able to come up with anything decent so, again, it’s over to you – if you think you have a certain phrase that captures the power, versatility and (probable) incompetence of my machine then please let me know – I’ll be forever grateful.

Thankfully, I have a couple of weapons at my disposal. The first is an almost alarming lack of dignity that means going cap in hand into the world isn’t going to faze me at all. Couple that with a distinct lack of common sense or taste and you’ve a formidable begging combination. However, my most important weapon is you… I desperately need your help. I need to find legitimate sources of free computing stuff: groups, organisations, tips, anything that will net me something completely free that I can stuff into a case (though I’ll be needing a case, too, thinking of it). Bear in mind, I’m not soliciting free stuff from you. I need to go through the everyday, normal channels that anybody could use if they wanted to do the same thing.

God only knows why I was chosen for this particular task, maybe it was my Ringo Starr accent, or my dress sense which has something of the homeless chic to it I admit, but I absolutely refuse to lose out to my comparatively loaded colleagues.

Goodwill is a powerful thing, and people are generally brilliant if given half a chance. Now let’s see if together they’re powerful enough to build a PC from scratch.

We’ve charged Darien Graham-Smith with spending £250 on a second-hand machine, we’ll be sending David Fearon to the high street to find his perfect PC (or laptop), while David Bayon will be doing the same but online.

Meanwhile Mike Jennings will be speccing up his own machine – hopefully with your help – and Stuart Turton has the ultimate challenge: to build a PC for precisely nothing.

The rules are simple. I’ll give all of them (apart from Stu) £250 and they have to obtain or build the best machine they can. If they choose a PC, it doesn’t need a monitor but will need a keyboard and mouse. They have to pose as normal customers and they can’t spend a penny more than the £250 (which includes VAT and delivery).

So, over the next two weeks we’ll be uploading blogs, photos and videos to mark everyone’s progress. Click on the brand-new blog category called The £250 Challenge to see what they’re all up to.

Once all the PCs and laptops are in, I’ll be passing final judgement to decide the winner – and that winner (and the whole feature) will be announced in issue 175 of PC Pro, which hits the newsstand on the 12th of March.

And that’s when we’ll also be giving all PC Pro readers a chance to win the machines we’ve bought and built (though we may spare you from Stuart’s offering).

Good luck to all the contestants, and thanks in advance to everyone who helps them – the very best piece of advice will earn its giver a very special prize…