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.

As we speak motor-mouthed deputy editor David Fearon is bringing his unique bartering style to the shops on Tottenham Court Road in an attempt to wangle a £250 PC out of our tight-fisted neighbours.

The boy/beast that is staff-writer Mike Jennings has already assembled his stunted gaming PC and now spends most of his day making it watch eighties action movies in the hope that all this machismo will shame it into a spontaneous upgrade. The technology equivalent of putting hairs on its chest.

Taking inspiration from Gordon Gecko, David Bayon donned a power suit and simply glowered at the Internet until it offered him a cheap PC in exchange for leaving it alone. He’s currently puffing away on a large cigar and shouting “sell sell” at Darien Graham-Smith,  who hasn’t spoken since escaping the blatant falsehoods dwelling in the eighth level of hell that is Ebay. He now wears the look of a man standing in the ash at the end of the world, and we can only assume he’ll come back to us when he’s ready.

All of which leaves myself and the currently non-existent Goodwill PC. If Darien was forced to confront the Inferno, then I guess I’m headed for Paradiso; a journey which will explore just how generous folks are. My first stop was the wonderfully monickered Freecycle, where anybody with free stuff can advertise it to people in their area for collection.

It’s a remarkably brilliant idea and after signing up to five local groups I was determined to fully explore its potential. What’s truly and utterly superb about Freecycle is that you can advertise anything. So, one minute you’ll be scanning an ad for a free 24in television and the next “pregnancy bits and bobs”. Which bits and which bobs are not expanded on, but I chose not to dwell.

Even if that’s not your thing, surely somebody out there wants a pair of “wooden stilts” or a “Canadian Christmas Pine”. You can even post up adverts for things you want, such as “any items for keeping terrapin turtles”. Now, I admit the sheer madness of this place very quickly went to my head, and though I have no idea where I’ll keep the mini bar, I’m sure it’ll fit somewhere.

Anyway, buried in a stack of older posts I stumbled on somebody offering a HP laptop. No spec listed. No details beyond the fact that it’s two or three years old. It’ll do. Beggars can’t be choosers, and they sure as hell can’t play Far Cry 2, so I hit the reply button and then… ran into my first problem. How do you ask for free stuff? What’s the etiquette here?

“Hi there, I saw your advert for the laptop and I ….” how to phrase this… want it, need it, would like it please?

That can’t be it. Years of being smacked on the ear and being told to be polite sent me hurtling deeper into the message. “I could pick it up immediately.” Good touch, nice that, I patted myself on the back. Will he want to know why I want it? Probably. “I’m intent on throwing off the shackles of our capitalistic society and proving you can get something for free, and that good people like yourself are the reason.”

Erm, no. “I need to build a PC for free.. for work..” nope, too weird. “I can’t say why I need your laptop, I just do.” Well put Bond, you moron.

In the end I settled for “Hi there, I saw your advert for the laptop and it sounds perfect for work. I could pick it up immedaitely.”

And yet, it still sounds … so lacking. Surely, a person decent enough to simply give something away deserves more. Where’s the button on my email account that pats him on the back and offers him a biscuit? Which is not to say he sent it to me. At is turns out the other brilliant thing about Freecycle is that the good stuff is awarded to the worthiest cause, which rather undermines my entire work case. Damn, damn and damn.

So I’m back on the boards, searching for more free stuff and desperately trying to bulk out my case without mentioning the real, rather hollow reasoning behind it. We just want to see if it can be done…