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So I'm on Packard Bell's Web site, several months before the one-time giant said it would withdraw from the U.S. computer market. I'm trying to figure out how to fix a broken clock on my PC, and I'm being followed by a set of animated dentures. These chattering teeth--they look like the wind-up choppers sold in novelty stores--tout the site's chat room. And I can't turn them off. I comb the site's FAQ library for an answer (chomp chomp chomp), but it's not there. I try the search engine (chomp chomp chomp) without success. I even stop by the damned chat room, but it's closed (chomp chomp).

I'm about to throw a shoe at the monitor when I reach the user forum, where I'm greeted by diatribes of frustration. One posting rages: "How do you expect your customers to learn to use your machines? The 800 phone line is always choked....The chat room is virtually never open....Finding the appropriate message is almost impossible....The search tool is a blunt instrument. This is grotesque!"

Welcome to the brave new world of PC service and support. As system prices plunge--and profit margins shrink--more and more manufacturers are herding customers onto the Web to look for solutions on their own.

Dell, one of the best PC companies when it comes to providing online help, is flooded with requests for Web support. According to the company, customers download more than 200,000 technical data files each week, and Dell's online, natural-language search engine answers more than 400,000 technical questions per month. When Toshiba's technical support site launched quietly in March 1999, no one could have predicted that it would receive 1.5 million hits by August.

But as PC World's most recent Reliability and Service survey reveals, exchanging hold times for download times isn't necessarily a consumer-friendly solution. (For complete results of the survey, conducted in conjunction with Survey.com of San Jose, California, see the charts on the following pages.) And as we discovered in our own tour of major manufacturers' Web sites, getting answers over the Internet--assuming you have any way to get online in the first place--is no easier than navigating voice-mail mazes and dealing with technicians on the phone.