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Imagine a world where your refrigerator was as reliable as your PC. It doesn't sound too appetizing, does it? You'd probably end up eating out a lot, and your kitchen would soon smell like a landfill.

But fear not. The average refrigerator is (fortunately for your stomach) a great deal more dependable than the average computer. Of course, compared to a PC, your good old fridge is a much simpler appliance: It has fewer functions, its only peripherals are kitchen magnets, and it doesn't outdate itself or need to interact with software--not yet, anyway. And if you accidentally put a load of fresh vegetables in the drawer marked fruits, your fridge will not crash. With your computer, though, simple acts like installing a scanner can lead to deadly freeze-ups.

Alas, while we long for the day when PCs are as unfailing as fridges or other trusty household appliances, we know we're dreaming. In fact, the responses from almost 16,000 PC World subscribers in our PC Reliability and Service survey just reaffirmed what we've been saying for years: PCs still have a long way to go. Compared to the findings in our last report in January, our most recent data shows that computer owners are experiencing more problems, the quality of service has dropped in many instances, and fewer people are truly happy with their PCs and the companies that make them.

Take Gateway customer Monte Lawson, for instance. This Selah, Washington, resident is one unhappy camper. He ran into problems shortly after he purchased his Gateway home system. Now, two years down the road, he's still having trouble. The machine refuses to boot from a power-off state until he hits the reset button. "You can hear the hard disk for a few seconds, and then the system just stops," recounts Lawson. "You don't see BIOS messages, [you don't see] anything." Lawson is disgruntled because Gateway has not been able to resolve the problem, even after some 25 calls to the company. "They replaced the power supply, the motherboard, and all the memory, to no avail," he recalls. To make matters worse, it often takes Lawson 30 minutes or so to get through to a live support technician.

Lawson is not alone in his grumblings. Owners of Micron and Quantex home PCs also had some negative things to say about their PC makers' product reliability and support. At the other end of the spectrum, Dell stays at the top of the class in work and home PCs, despite a drop from five stars to four in its overall service rating for home machines. For a detailed breakdown of each manufacturer's ratings across our six reliability and six service measures, turn to our charts on Home PCs, Work PCs, and Notebook PCs.

Battle of the Appliances

Industry luminaries have long told us that PCs should be as easy to use and reliable as any household appliance. So how do they stack up in reliability against appliances and other consumer electronics? We studied product repair histories for 13 types of products--including desktop PCs--published by Consumer Union's Consumer Reports. The comparison wasn't exactly apples to apples--age and usage varied--but it provided a general means of comparison. We averaged the percentage of problems per company for different kinds of appliances.

According to those numbers, roughly 22 percent of computers break down each year. That makes them significantly worse on average than VCRs (9 percent), big-screen TVs (7 percent), clothes dryers (7 percent), and refrigerators (8 percent), but about as problematic as vacuum cleaners (22 percent). The only product we found with a problem rate higher than a computer's is the riding lawn mower and lawn tractor, which showed an average problem rate of about 25 percent.

Ray Kent, president of The Service Center, an independent appliance repair shop based in Portland, Oregon, says that from his perspective, PCs are generally more problematic than other appliances. Kent reports that refrigerators, washers, and ranges often last seven years before needing service; microwaves, five years; and dryers, four to five years.

Contrast that with the results of our survey of PC users: On average, our subscribers report close to two problems each year with their home computers.