Mini-notebooks continue to prop up the market, as western european PC shipments dropped by 3.3 per cent in Q2 2009, according to Gartner.

All three major markets – the UK, France and Germany - saw negative growth, and Gartner predicts the trend will continue for the rest of the year. The UK was described as the ‘weakest’ market by the analyst.

Ranjit Atwal, principal analyst at Gartner, said: “You have to view the market with and without mini-notebooks to understand the true picture. Without them, the market would have declined more than 15 per cent, but given the new routes to market and price points of these PCs, they have managed to prevent a more severe decline.”

In the UK, HP was hit hard, dropping out of the top two positions to third place, usurped by arch rival Dell in the top position, with Acer in second place. Toshiba and Apple completed the top five.

Total shipments for Q2 totalled 2.6 million units, a decline of 6.5 per cent compared with 2008.

Gartner said vendors had relied on the consumer market in previous quarters, but the second quarter “failed to provide many opportunities”, with any increase in mini-notebook shipments offset by a decline in mainstream notebooks.

Atwal said: “The difference this quarter was that both the professional and consumer markets were weak in the quarter. This was highlighted by the level of decline across both desk-based and mobile PC platforms, with a quarter of the market disappearing.”

He painted a gloomy picture for the UK ahead.

“There is much discussion on where the market is headed and at the moment there is only one direction and that is down. Even with the onset of “back to school promotions”, new products and Windows 7 to become available in the fourth quarter, the market will not recover until 2010,” he said.

David Pratt, chief operating officer at thin client specialist ThinkGrid, said the results were not surprising.

“Part of the decline is no doubt down to the economy, but as businesses look at new ways to cut costs, we predict that the emergence of hosted virtual desktops and software as a service will fuel this downward trend.

“Rather than having to go through the hassle of refreshing desktop hardware every two or three years, we are seeing businesses hanging on to their old PCs and using them to access hosted virtual desktops and a range of other on demand IT services.

“Unfortunately for PC manufacturers, this isn’t just a blip but a sign of things to come. Businesses will turn to hosted desktops and cloud services rather than investing in local hardware and software every few years.”