(FORTUNE Magazine) – The editors of PC/Computing are currently polling their readers on the fateful question: ''Have PCs changed your life?'' Eager to particularize, but feeling hemmed in by the form provided for faxing in an answer, we go public in Keeping Up. Friends, it is true: Personal computers have changed everything. Life is far more fascinating than before. Your servant now spends perhaps 60 hours a week enthralledly staring at the monitor on his Dell 486D/25 PC while creating copy, zapping it back and forth with editors, playing chess on screen, paying bills, downloading financial statements, buying Mickey Mouse watches and retrieving news stories on-line, and (in the latest week) discovering before the election that President Bush had lost his chance to pull off an upset (see ^ our lead item), all the while recording such happenings in an increasingly detailed diary that makes it possible, with the aid of a program called Gofer, to instantly specify how many times per year one has lunch with various personages. Neat, eh? This program was also onstage the other day when someone, having just read the manuscript of our forthcoming book (on the IQ controversy), suggested unkindly that we were overusing the phrase ''to be sure.'' The chap was possibly right: Gofer instantly reported 25 occurrences of the phrase in the book. To be sure, it is indispensable to fair-minded folks who feel obliged to note exceptions and qualifications as they march through life. As some of our examples suggest, not all PC-related activities are productivity-enhancing. The machine represents an endless temptation to waste many minutes searching for efficiencies that save a few seconds. Having noted this basic phenomenon before, we settle for the latest ludicrous example, discovered in the columns of PC Magazine. The subject was doubled words in spell-checkers. Just about all word-processing programs offer spell-checkers that not only pick up outright misspellings but also point to repeated words, e.g., ''the the,'' as typing errors needing to be fixed. Problem posed in the magazine the other day: How do you tell the checker to lay off if you are writing a travel brochure about Pago Pago? It turns out that there actually is a way to do it in some word-processing programs, but not in our own XyWrite, as we discovered after much experimentation. Personal computing is fascinating in another way: It brings dizzying mysteries to everyday life. Just about all heavy users are at times prey to wildly inexplicable behavior by the machine. One of our own durable bafflements concerns a program called Send/Fetch, which enables writers to send in copy to the office and retrieve it at home. The program works beautifully for most writers, but our own copy has a glitch that nobody can explain or correct. When retrieving copy, it stops abruptly upon encountering an ellipsis, i.e., the three dots used to signify an omission in, say, an Only in America item. It provides the first dot, then shuts off. Other writers using the same program, and retrieving the same copy, have no ellipsis problem; it is somehow specific to our own operation. But how? Weirder still is a chess problem. Invincibly blunder-prone, we nevertheless spend a lot of time fighting Chessmaster 3000, a popular program that beats us % maybe four times out of five at a not very high level. Around six months ago the program developed a bad habit -- suddenly turning itself off in the middle of games. With no warning at all, the chessboard would disappear from the monitor, replaced by an otherwise blank screen with this cabalistic message: ''Critical Error! Last Loaded Resource = 49. ENGINE FATAL 2300.'' After a while we noticed something even spookier: Chessmaster was doing this disappearing act only when confronted with the Ruy Lopez exchange variation -- an opening in which our bishop takes its knight on square c6 on the fourth move. Stranger still, the program wasn't even consistent: Sometimes it went right on playing after that sequence. (But it always went right on playing with any other sequence.) Or don't you find that fascinating?