Sundays around the AtAT headquarters are generally a pretty placid time, devoted to those mundane tasks that just have to get done despite not being any fun-- bill-paying, grocery shopping, all those little things that chew up time whether you like it or not. But it's sort of liberating to lose oneself to the simple function of folding laundry; no matter how much work is waiting, at some point laundry just has to take precedence. That's what Sundays are for, and there's always an evening of Fox TV at the end of the day as a happy reward.

And yet, sometimes things just aren't as tranquil on the other side of the fence. We were forced to forgo a new episode of The Simpsons when we received a phone call from a cousin's fiancé, whom we'd never even met, but who was at the end of his rope and called us for computer advice since we are "computer people." This poor gent has a Packard-Bell (uh-oh) which has been giving him grief; whenever he runs any software that needs to access the CD-ROM drive, the whole system freezes up. He took the system into CompUSA for service (double uh-oh), who charged him a hundred bucks to tell him that there was nothing wrong with the hardware and to recommend that he restore the software on his hard disk to its factory-original state-- which he had done previously, to no avail. He asked us how he could open up the computer to see if maybe something was loose inside, because he just didn't know what else to do. A regular Consumer Reports reader, he hadn't even tried contacting Packard-Bell's customer service department, because he was firmly convinced it wouldn't get him anywhere at all.

Folks, this is a writer, not a tech-head. The poor guy just wants to work on his novel and play some games to relax, but it's not so relaxing to see every CD-ROM-based game crash one's system. Despite knowing very little about computers, he's frustrated enough to want to pull his machine open in a desperate hope that he'll be able to see what's wrong with it. (Perhaps a big BROKEN/FIXED switch set in the BROKEN position?) After we recommended at least trying Packard-Bell's tech support and possibly trying to locate updated drivers for his CD-ROM drive, he noted that he was sorely tempted to throw the thing out the window and buy a new one-- at which point he asked us what we knew about the iMac. That was the point at which we knew we'd have to make the supreme sacrifice and miss The Simpsons, as we answered question after question about the iMac's ease of use and whether it really "just worked" right out of the box. The point of this whole story is this: we are now very clear on why there's a sizeable percentage of ex-Windows users buying iMacs these days. If you're a computer-savvy individual, it's easy to forget just how intimidating and bewildering even the simplest problems can be to the "average Joe." And whether this cousin's fiancé winds up chucking the Wintel and getting an iMac or not, the whole frenzied phone call just made us surer than ever that while the iMac's style may be the sizzle, its simplicity is its most crucial feature.