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PC Pro has heard whispers that at least two of Britain's few remaining PC manufacturers are tightening already tight belts after experiencing the same kind of post-Christmas sales slump as tinsel and crackers. And that's sombre news indeed for PC buyers, because many of the things we've taken for granted over the years - most notably local support and an English voice at the other end of the phone line - are disappearing faster than MPs' expenses.

Ten years ago, when I first arrived in this parish, our reviews pages were replete with names of British PC firms: Carrera, Dotlink, Dan, Evesham, Panrix and Viglen to name but a few. In those days, the reviews editor used to turn down the ringer on his phone just so he could get some work done, so sick was he of being pestered by largely British PC manufacturers desperate to send in a machine.

Nowadays, it's us who do the pestering. The likes of Dell, HP and Sony were around in those days, too, of course. But the British manufacturers set themselves apart from the international supergiants by relying on local service and support. When you're spending £10,000 on kitting out the office with new PCs, it's reassuring that the salesman knows your Birmingham base is just up the M1 and his driver can get there the following morning, rather than talking to a script-reading teenager in a foreign call centre, who can't tell Dudley from Dubai.

And without getting too Daily Mail about it, it makes even more difference when the support staff on the other end of the line share the same native tongue as you. A couple of years ago, I had problems setting up my wireless router and called the Belkin helpdesk and, while the foreign support assistant was eventually brilliant at diagnosing a relatively complex issue with my encryption setup, the language barrier was so immense that we ended up communicating like police officers checking a car number plate over the radio.

"Yes, that's W for woman, E for elephant, P for please fetch someone who speaks a shade more than pidgin English, so that I don't have to waste half my day speaking like Juliet bloody Bravo."

British award winners

I

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don't think it's any coincidence that British companies have dominated the PC Pro Reliability & Service Awards over the years. Talking about complicated, jargon-laden matters over the telephone is difficult enough as it is, without having to worry whether the blameless soul on the other end of the phone really understands what you're saying.

Another benefit of the British PC boom of the mid-1990s was that manufacturers were forced to compete on warranties. Three-year cover was the norm. A particularly sniffy review from PC Pro's early years might have upbraided a manufacturer for making the last two years of its warranty "return to base" instead of "on-site".

Compare and contrast to our most recent consumer PCs Labs, where the vast majority of warranties last for only a single year. Lengthy warranties are, like many British PC makers of yesteryear, a casualty of tighter profit margins on PC
hardware.

The firms make more money on selling another two years of support than they do on the machine itself. And now Dell is looking to make even more savings: it recently announced it was sourcing $70 billion-worth of components from China over the next two years as it attempts to eke another dollar or two out of the £300 boxes that comprise those full-page newspaper ads.

But as Stewart Mitchell discovered in a recent PC Probe, more and more of the components coming out of China are cloned - fakes so convincing that Customs and even the manufacturers themselves can't tell them apart. Often the first time anyone realises there's a problem is when a component fails - probably just after their year's warranty has expired...

Supermarket shelf stackers

The desktop PC has become a commodity: a high-tech can of beans that manufacturers are forced to stack high and sell cheap - even on supermarket shelves. And all the signs indicate the laptop market is heading down a similar path, following the success of the £200 Asus Eee PC. "If Asus starts to do well, we are all in trouble - that's just a race to the bottom,"
said Sony's senior vice-president Mike Arbary recently.

If a company with Sony's resources is worried, what hope does a small British firm have? We thought the PC market was cut-throat back in
1998. Today, it's positively savage. Join me here in ten years' time when I'll be bemoaning the fact that my Mandarin isn't good enough to communicate with my PC manufacturer's automated support bot and wondering whether to buy a new
computer or wait a week for the free one they're giving away with The Sunday Times.