US PC shipments grew for the first time for a year in Q1, 2002, according to Gartner Dataquest's number crunchers. But worldwide, PC sales were flat.

Worldwide PC shipment were 32.7m units in Q1, with the US accounting for 11.1m units. This was 2.3 per cent up on Q1, last year, which everyone at the time thought was a bad quarter. So the US growth rate this year is not exactly sparkling. "Sluggish," Gartner calls it.

It says there is little evidence of large accounts resuming historic buying patterns, and so the outlook for the rest of the year remains highly uncertain.

There's one big bright spot - notebook shipments to consumers. It will be interesting to see what impact rising TFT-LCD prices will have on demand.

And guess who was top of the tree in Q1? Yes, that's right, Dell, which increased shipments by 13.7 per cent, and grew market share on the back of strong desktop sales. All its major competitors saw sales drop. In the US, Dell now accounts for 26.3 per cent of PC unit shipments - more than no.2 (Compaq), no.3 (HP) and no.4 (IBM) combined. ®