AUSTIN, Texas - The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn't get her new Dell computer to turn on. Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer Corp. technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked the woman what happened when she pushed the power button. "I've pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens," the woman replied. "Foot pedal?" the technician asked. "Yes," the woman said, "this little white foot pedal with the on switch." The "foot pedal," it turned out, was the computer's mouse, a hand-operated device that helps to control the computer's operations.

One woman called Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install batteries in her laptop. When told that the directions were on the first page of the manual, says Steve Smith, Dell director of technical support, the woman replied angrily, "I just paid $2,000 for this !@#? thing, and I'm not going to read a book."

Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is inundated by some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one related by technician John Wolf: "A frustrated customer called, who said her brand new Contura would not work. She said she had unpacked the unit, plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked, 'What power switch?"

Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So many people have called to ask where the "any" key is when "Press Any Key" flashes on the screen that Compaq is considering changing the command to "Press Return Key."

Some people can't figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, an AST technical support supervisor, says one customer complained that her mouse was hard to control with the "dust cover" on. The cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.

Dell technician Wayne Zieschang says one of his customers held the mouse and pointed it at the screen, all the while clicking madly.

Disk drives are another bugaboo. One customer was having trouble reading word-processing files from his old diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with the diskette. The customer's response: "I put a label on the diskette, roll it into the typewriter..."

At Dell, a technician advised his customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and "close the door." Asking the technician to "hold on," the customer put the phone down and was heard walking over to shut the door to his room.

The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling. A Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.

Another customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it, he said, filling up his tub with soap and water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and then removing all the keys and washing them individually.

A user came into a service bureau with a file on a 5.25 inch disk. The proprietor apologized and explained that the data would have to be transferred to a 3.5 inch disk first. The user asked, "Couldn't we just get a scissors and trim it?"

A customer was perplexed by an error that would appear every time she tried to print. The computer would say, "Looking for LaserWriter" and after a while, "Can't find LaserWriter." Her solution? she turned the Mac so that the screen faced the printer.

A tech once calmed a woman who was enraged because "her computer had told her she was bad and an invalid." The tech patiently explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.

#1: So I was talking to this guy, and I'd been on the phone about 20 minutes, and we were getting nowhere. Nothing was working. I finally asked him, "John, do you by any chance have Windows?"

"Sure," he said. "There's one right here over my desk. Do you think THAT'S the problem?"

#2: This nice lady and I were trying to figure why the 5.25-inch floppy disk drive on her new PC wasn't reading disks. She was new to PC's, new to disks, new to the idea of phone support.

She had been trying to set up WordPerfect on the machine's hard drive, and she couldn't get it to read ANY of the disks in the package. It was maybe her third call to us. So I finally said, "Look, let's just go back to square one and start over from the very beginning. Now, take the first disk out of the sleeve and put it in the drive."

"I've already done that," she said, kind of peevishly. "I trimmed right inside the edge of that black sleeve and took this little floppy thing out, but you know, it's really hard to get it stiff enough to slide into the drive."

#3: We don't usually do software support, but he'd gotten Works as a bundle with our machine, so we had to help him get started. But everything he tried failed; the floppy disk drive just wouldn't read the Install disk. I figured he must have a bad disk, but he insisted it worked fine on another PC he'd tried, so he didn't think Microsoft was going to replace his program disks.

So I asked him to send me a copy of the disks, so I could see if I could read it on a machine here. He said he'd send it by FedEx, so we could solve this fast.

The next day, I get this FedEx overnight envelope from him, and when I opened it, a piece of paper with a black square on it fell out. He'd put the disk on his Xerox machine and made a paper copy of the disk.

#4: This guy's system came up okay, but he kept saying he was getting a black screen. I couldn't tell whether he meant a BLANK screen--which at least meant the hardware was working--or a truly black screen, like the monitor wasn't coming on.

So I finally asked him to make sure the monitor was plugged in. He said it was: The cable ran right from the back of the monitor to that funny jack on the back of the CPU.

"And the power cable?" I asked.

"What power cable?" he said. "You mean I have to plug this thing into the wall, too?"

#5: The sales support people had passed this woman on to me. She'd called in to see if there was any way she could add three or four more floppy disk drives to her new PC, because she was running out of storage space.

I told her there were technical problems with that, and space problems, too: There just wasn't enough room inside that chassis for more than two half-heights, plus the full-height hard drive my screen showed we'd installed in her machine when we shipped it.

"Well, I've got to do something," she said. "Every night before I go home, I copy all the files from my hard drive onto floppy disks, and I've got more files now than I can get onto one floppy."

I complemented her on her attention to back-up procedures, but I suggested she really didn't need to be quite that careful: hard drives are pretty reliable these days.

"But what's going to happen to those files when I turn the PC off?" she said. "Don't those files I copy onto the hard drive every morning go away when I turn the power off?"