You might have read, chums, that the PC is the games machine of the future.

Treat those yay-sayers as you would a bumbling clown.

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"With its infinitely upgradeable structure and huge market penetration, the PC will survive, grow and flourish well into the next century as the dominant video games platform."

That random example is the kind of thing you might well hear from both games and mainstream media these days. But it's complete tripe of the very fishiest order.

Here's what will happen, in my true personal experience, if you buy a PC to play games on. Or for any other reason.

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Month 1: You lay out around £1,500 for your spanky new super-tech machine. (This is, apparently, always the rough price of a decent entry-level PC, whatever the specs of the time are.)

Despite the lack of a coherent manual (because all the bits will come from different manufacturers and won't necessarily like working with each other), you'll probably get it running in no more than a couple of hours.

This is where your troubles will begin.

(PS Your soundcard won't work).

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Month 2: Right on schedule, Microsoft will release a brand new operating system which makes the one you're using obsolete ("It was rubbish all along", Microsoft will say. "We were joking").

And since they'll twist games firms' arms to make the system the standard one for games, you'll have to get it, as all the top titles in the next couple of years will only run on it.

You'll fork out for the new operating system (say £90) and attempt to install it. Your PC will not like this.

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Month 3: After a couple of weeks, and with many calls to various helplines, you'll have ironed out most of the "system conflicts" caused by your new operating system.

(Your soundcard probably still won't work, but you can come back to that a bit later on.)

You'll discover that the new OS ("Windows 98", say), will in fact be really useless at running games at a decent speed on your rapidly-dating Pentium 200.

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Month 4: Exhausted at the strain of running "Windows 98" on your pathetically inadequate Pentium 200, your PC's hard drive will fail.

You will take it back to the shop, where the Technical Support department will attempt to repair it by hitting it increasingly hard with the blunt end of a great big screwdriver. (True.)

It will then transpire that you had a simple "chip fan" problem, but that the big screwdriver has broken your hard drive for real. You will replace it.

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Month 5: You will finish reinstalling all the programs and files which were lost when you had to replace your hard drive. You will decide to buy a "backup drive" to save all your files to tape in case the same thing happens again.

The tape drive will cost, say, £150, but will not come with the necessary software to run it on "Windows 98". You will send away the special postcard to get the compatible software.

Nine weeks will pass. Your hard drive will make alarming twanging sounds.

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Month 9: Two days before the backup software finally arrives, your hard drive will crash again, losing all your data forever.

You will swear non-stop for two days.

The huge retail chain where you bought the PC will go bust. You will buy a replacement hard drive (£200), and spend another three weeks retrieving and reinstalling all your files.

Your soundcard still won't work.

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Month 10: After months of futile attempts, for no reason at all your soundcard will suddenly start working perfectly of its own accord.

Excited, your printer (£340) will decide to join the fun, printing out 15 pages with a single line of gibberish on each one every time the soundcard makes a noise. You will cunningly solve this problem by unplugging the printer.

Flushed with this relative success, you will decide to buy a nice modem (£160) and get in on this "InterWeb" thing.

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Month 11: You will be forced to pay an "Internet Service Provider" a year's subscription in advance (£180), plus a "setting-up" fee (£50) for, apparently, sending you a disk.

The manufacturer of the tape drive you bought six months ago will cheerfully send you three further copies of the backup software on consecutive days.

It will turn out that your new Internet software isn't compatible with "Windows 98" either. You will send off another special postcard.

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Month 12: You will realise that your hard drive isn't big enough to store the big-name games of the time on, as they use anything up to 20% of your entire drive space each.

You will buy a second, bigger hard drive (£250), which will be physically the wrong shape to fit inside your PC's case, and will have to be attached with nails by the man at the PC shop.

Your new Internet software will have arrived, but you still won't be able to actually get online for some reason.

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Month 13: You will, after six weeks of inconceivable frustration, finally succeed in getting "on" the Internet.

However, technology has progressed in the meantime, and your modem will be starting to look woefully underpowered to download the huge new files you'll want to look at. (Shareware game demos will be clocking in at over 5Mb, or three hours telephone time.)

Around this point, although you won't have done a thing to it, your soundcard will inexplicably stop working again.

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Month 14: You will buy a new soundcard (£65) and speakers (£30) to replace the cheap and nasty one which came with your PC when you bought it. Worryingly, they will both work first time.

You will be downloading a huge amount of really fun things from the Internet, from game demos to Spectrum emulators and pictures of Gillian Anderson that someone's fiddled around with to look like she's got no clothes on.

Everything will be just great.

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Month 15: You will get your first post-Internet telephone bill (£300). You will decide that you must save money by buying a much faster modem (£180).

The modem will come with an advanced "voice mail" feature, which will enable the modem to also act as an "electronic secretary".

In practice, what this will actually mean is that every time someone phones you, both your PC and telephone line will silently lock up until you unplug them both from the wall.

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Month 16: You cunningly solve your modem problem by switching off all the advanced "electronic secretary" features. In sympathy, your new hard drive will crash.

You will attempt to restore all your files from your tape backup, only to find that all your programs needed special hidden "system" files that you didn't know about and hadn't put on the tape, in order to work.

You will decide that perhaps what your PC needs is a bit of extra power.

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Month 17: You will buy a special speed-doubling chip for your main "processor" (£350) in order to run all the new games at their proper speed. It will increase the speed of your system by roughly 4%.

You will also decide to upgrade your PC's memory (£300), which will boost your system's speed by anything up to another 5%.

Your friend Bill will buy the new Nintendo 128 for £150 and play "Mario 128" for the next three solid weeks.

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Month 18: You will decide that your PC must help to pay for itself by becoming a proper work machine as well as playing games. You buy a "suite" of "office" programs (£200).

Your new office suite will completely destroy your old email program (which you will only just have come to terms with) without asking.

You will buy a hot new game after reading some great reviews. Too late, you will notice the "minimum system", which the mags have but you don't.

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Month 19: You will think "In for a penny, in for a pound", and buy a new "graphics accelerator" (£120) to play the great-looking new games which are coming out and look nearly as good as the Nintendo 128 ones.

You will have a small lottery win, and decide to also buy a brand-new, superfast processor (£300), which is apparently necessary to run the great-looking new games properly.

You will discover that this processor is too powerful for your "motherboard".

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Month 20: You will buy a new "motherboard" (£110). You will notice that memory chips now cost less than a fifth of what they did when you bought some back in Month 17, and will buy some more while they're cheap (£120).

By this time, you will feel that you have a super-ninja PC, ready for anything games developers can throw at it for years to come.

At this point, both of your hard drives will fail simultaneously. Your tape drive will have stopped working.

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Month 21: Cleverly, however, you will have pre-empted your latest hard drive catastrophe by buying a new and far superior backup system (£120). And some cartridges to use in it (£210).

You will lug your PC down to the repair shop once more, pausing only to notice that their repair charges have recently gone up to £40 an hour.

Repairing your PC will take the shop eight hours (£320).

You will decide to do some adding up.

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Month 22: You will finally finish adding things up, remembering at the last minute to include the repair shop's previous charges (£180).

You will notice, with some dismay, that you have so far spent £5,825 on a games machine that doesn't appear to be quite up to the technical standards of a £150 console and doesn't work properly around 30% of the time.

You will realise that it's nearly time to renew your Internet subscription.

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Month 23: Coming out of a lengthy depression, you will calculate that instead of a PC, you could have bought every single games console released anywhere in the world since 1978. Twice. With games.

You will realise that the nation's magazine writers are, largely, dim-witted poltroons who should be drowned in custard.

You will realise that only an utter idiot would ever buy a PC with the intention of using it to play games on.

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Month 24: You will realise that if you wanted to do word-processing too, you could buy a machine specifically dedicated to that purpose for £300.

You will realise that, if you are a professional person planning to use your PC for work, you can ill afford to lose the seven weeks you've spent with your PC lying broken and useless.

(You will also realise that that you've reached Digitiser after accidentally mis-typing the page number for the business section.)

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And finally, two years older and £6,000 poorer, you will come to realise that only a complete fool would ever buy a PC for any reason at all.

You will feel a bit stupid, but you will vow to try to stop anyone else from making the same dumb mistake.

You will devote the rest of your life to camping outside PC World chanting a hypnotic mantra, in the hope that you might save a few poor souls.