When people buy a computer, they want to plug it in and start writing letters or surfing the Internet.

Most buyers will find this won't happen.

I spent the better part of a day buying, setting up and configuring a computer for my mother. It's a wonder more people don't hurl the things through the plate-glass windows of computer stores.

By way of background, my mother is 73, and I decided to buy her a replacement for the 486DX she was using. If you're buying a new computer, you can take advantage of some of the things we learned - the hard way:

Tip 1: Know what you will use the computer for.

Mom needed a machine to do word processing for her duties as president of the residents' association of her retirement community and to access America Online.

She didn't need the fastest, most powerful machine available. And I didn't want to spend a lot of money. We headed to CompUSA.

We reluctantly decided against the spiffy iMac. I am not nearly as familiar with Apple's operating system as I am with Windows, and offering my mother technical support was important.

We looked at the low-end machines and settled on a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 6330. It had 48 megabytes of RAM, a 4-gigabyte hard drive and a 300-megahertz processor. We selected a 15-inch HP monitor and a Canon BJC-4400 printer.

Tip 2: If you know little or nothing about computers, don't walk into a computer store without a knowledgeable companion.

The CompUSA clerk left to gather the hardware. We picked up WordPerfect Suite 8 and the "Complete National Geographic CD-ROM Edition."

The clerk assembled the hardware, including a "printer pack" that comprised 200 sheets of paper and a bidirectional parallel printer cable. (Will someone tell me why printer manufacturers don't include the cable? It's like selling a car without the tires.) The price: $59.95. I told the clerk to put the "printer pack" back and get me just the cable, which cost $10.

The price for the computer, monitor, printer, cable and software was $1,737.

Tip 3: Buy and set up the computer on a weekday. Computer stores and manufacturers' technical-support lines are less busy than on evenings and weekends.

At my mother's house, the unpacking went quickly and smoothly till I grabbed the owner's manual and the Windows certificate and prepared to power up. The monitor did not respond.

I looked around and found the monitor's power cable sitting on a desk. Even experienced users make dumb mistakes.

With the monitor working, I turned on the computer and prepared to set up Windows 98. The first screen requires that you type in the "product key" for the Windows software. I looked at the certificate on the Windows 98 CD-ROM and started typing.

The form on the computer screen required a sequence of characters that looked like this: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX- XXXXX. Unfortunately, the ID on the Windows certificate looked like this: XXXXX-XXX-XXXXX-XXXXX.

I made a toll call to HP, where I waited on hold for five minutes until I could explain the problem to a technician named Roy. He said the Pavilion had certificates for Windows 95 and Windows 98 - but the Windows 98 certificate was on the Windows manual, not on the CD. Thus enlightened, I found the product key and continued the setup.

Things went awry again when I inserted the CD that came with the printer to install the drivers that make it work. The CD-ROM drive spun furiously, and at times the mouse wouldn't move at all. Several minutes later, the PC finally displayed the Blue Screen of Death, a sight that strikes fear into the hearts of Windows users. It means everything is frozen solid.

So I turned off the computer, waited 30 seconds and turned it on again. This time the computer booted up and displayed the Windows 98 desktop. A window on the screen suggested registering with HP, and a form appeared. I started typing in my mother's name, but nothing appeared on the screen. The keyboard, which had worked before, was not responding.

I rebooted. Still no response from the keyboard. So I placed a second toll call HP support.

After more than 10 minutes on hold, I got Randall. He had me cycle the power off and on, something I should have thought of. This time, the keyboard responded. While I was waiting for the computer to come on again, I asked Randall why the CD-ROM drive was causing the mouse to freeze periodically. He said the CD-ROM was using so much system memory that it interfered with the mouse's operation.

I wondered what Randall was smoking.

Tip 4: There are good tech-support people and bad tech-support people.

I went back to installing the printer drivers. Still no luck. For the third time in two hours, I made a toll call for tech support, this time to Canon. Eric answered in less than a minute. Unlike Randall, the HP techie, Eric knew his stuff. He talked me through several attempts to install the drivers, but each failed. Eric asked whether the CD-ROM drive was thrashing and making a lot of noise. "Like a drunken sailor on shore leave," I said. Eric said the drive might be defective and asked me to try another CD. I put in a CD with clip art and copied and pasted a graphic into a Microsoft Works document. No problem.

"The Canon CD probably is defective," Eric said, and talked me through installation of the printer drivers using the second Canon CD. It worked, and I triumphantly printed a test page.

Next it was time to configure the America Online software, which was pre-installed on the machine. I got to the prompt that asked for my mother's area code when the keyboard failed again. I rebooted and the keyboard worked.

Tip 5: Check the manufacturer's Web site if you have problems.

I went to Hewlett-Packard's Web site (www.hp.com) and saw messages from dozens of users with the same keyboard problem. So I made a fourth toll call to Hewlett-Packard, where a tech agreed to send my mother a new keyboard, for free. It arrived three days later.

This time, the space bar stuck and didn't work unless we pounded on it.

Toll calls five and six to HP yielded little help. The technician and his supervisors insisted that I remove and and reinstall the keyboard drivers before they would send a third keyboard. I refused, because they failed to explain how that was going to unstick the stuck key.

I went to CompUSA and purchased a generic keyboard for $10 and borrowed another from the office. Both worked fine. I left the generic keyboard with my mother.

I had spent more than four hours and made 60 minutes' worth of long-distance calls getting the machine to the point where my mother could type and print a few documents and get on AOL.

Her thoughts on all this: "Why does it have to be so difficult?"

My thought: I should have bought the iMac.

Send e-mail to kaseyjonecompuserve.com.

Pub Date: 11/30/98