Worldwide personal computer shipments increased in the third quarter from a year earlier and snapped a streak of declines going into the holiday season, market researchers said on Wednesday.

Inexpensive netbooks or mini-notebooks performed especially well, surging from about 17 per cent of the worldwide total in the second quarter to somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent, said Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa. That means overall PC revenue continued to decline, Ms Kitagawa said.