(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your call is important to us," said the recording. "Please stay on the line, and one of our representatives will be with you in a moment." I'd been on hold 20 minutes by then, consuming lunch and a newspaper while listening to variations on the same outrageous lie, repeated over and over in a warm, fruity voice. Now that the Cold War has ended, I don't suppose we can blame the horror of automated telephone answering systems on a communist conspiracy. Space aliens, maybe? "We care about your call," said the voice from a galaxy far away. "Please stay on the line for our next available representative."

The PC industry punishes nonconformity by forcing a Faustian bargain on anyone who dares try to customize a computer: In order to attain breakthrough performance, the user must do time in tech-support hell. Those of us who love the liberating power of computers accept this as a price we pay for products that can transform the way we work and live. When Fortune asked me to identify programs and gadgets that provide extraordinary benefits to the ordinary user, I spent lots of time on hold and learned more about the archaic innards of the PC than I'll ever want to know. Like a Volkswagen with a jet engine bolted on, today's fast PC is just a souped-up version of the IBM PC/AT of a decade ago.

All the same, hot-rodding has its rewards. I made multiple discoveries--the world's coolest storage device; a dazzling, soon-to-be-released laptop computer--and even found unexpected virtues in some familiar software.

The choices are entirely subjective, reflecting prejudices nurtured during more than a decade and a half of computer use. As you will have gathered from the photos, the selection includes ergonomic products as well as PCs and things that plug into them--lapbottoms as well as laptops, so to say. The rationale for ergonomic devices is simple: Any relationship between a human and a machine is by definition unnatural, yet we spend ever more of our lives interacting with these putty-colored plastic boxes. So we need all the help we can get. An added virtue of ergonomic devices is that most don't connect to the PC--which means you won't need to call tech support as soon as you try to use them.

A few years ago, severe pain in my back and wrist forced me to get serious about ergonomics. After considerable research I bought the elegantly inconspicuous, superbly comfortable Equa chair by Herman Miller. Its lower-back support is the next best thing to good posture; my lumbar pain disappeared before I paid the last credit-card installment.

The company's newest aid to equipoise, the Aeron (pictured), comes in three sizes and is almost too adjustable. You sit on a slightly elastic plastic mesh that supports you comfortably even when you move, and allows your body heat to dissipate. Herman Miller believes this seat-of-the-pants ventilation may help cut down on air-conditioning bills, but I didn't look into that: I recommend the chair solely on the basis of comfort and good looks. As the table shows, Aerons aren't cheap. Console yourself by buying an adjustable footrest for just $24 from the excellent Lyben computer-supply catalogue (810-268-8100).

Taking care of your wrists is easier. I used to suffer agonies after performing repetitive computer tasks, such as assembling mailing lists. Each bout of pain lasted for weeks, and elastic bandages purchased at the pharmacy helped only a little. The lasting solution turned out to be a $12 no-frills wrist rest, which raises and supports the hands for typing. You can find wrist rests in just about any computer store. Avoid gussied-up models with tracks and trolleys to move your hands from side to side: Your arms do that perfectly well.

Ever scrunch up your shoulder to hold the telephone while you type? I used to do that. Ouch! Far better to keep neck and shoulders aligned during conversations, with a featherweight headset such as the Plantronics model SP-05. Sure, headsets muss up your hair and sabotage your high-status executive look--but your neck won't hurt and your productivity might increase.

Ready to plug something in? If your desk is cramped, get a Kensington Expert Mouse, a desktop trackball that comes with its own wrist pad. This compact device sits in one spot; you control the onscreen cursor by rolling your hand over a sphere roughly the size of a billiard ball.

Don't be surprised if a new program or peripheral device pushes you into unaccustomed and perhaps unwelcome intimacy with your PC. If you really want to avoid trouble, leave everything just the way it was when you bought the machine. The minute you start trying to improve things, those calls to tech support become almost inevitable.

It's not that you're a klutz. IBM-type computers became dominant in the early 1980s because they stuck to a set of technical standards meant to ensure compatibility of hardware and software, no matter which manufacturer made what. The huge market that resulted offers consumers a far richer array of product choices than exist in the backwater realms of the Macintosh and the PowerPC. Unfortunately, maintaining even a minimum level of compatibility requires sticking to a 15-year-old architecture ill-suited for innovations such as CD-ROM drives and today's memory-hogging programs.

The more stuff you add, the more complex the interactions going on inside your PC--and when the symphony suddenly dies, you're stuck figuring out why. I got into trouble after installing a PaperMax scanner from Visioneer. Compact enough to fit between a desktop PC and its keyboard, the scanner sleeps happily until you feed in a piece of paper. It scans the document rather like a fax machine, and produces a digital snapshot of the page that it stores as a file on your hard disk. Using special software such as Caere's WordScan Plus, you can transform the file into ordinary text, which you can then edit using your word-processing program.

The scanner worked perfectly. Months later, however, I discovered that its software had left behind an unintentionally malevolent instruction that disabled a socket on my computer known as the serial port.

Result: Other programs that needed the socket could no longer get it to respond. This made it hard to use a tool I consider indispensable: Traveling Software's LapLink, a program for transferring files from one computer to another via cable, modem, or neato mini-radio transmitter. If you work with more than one computer, LapLink is essential for keeping files up to date.

The designers at Visioneer had created the trouble-causing instruction to reduce the chance of another device's signals, such as a mouse's, getting crossed with the scanner's. Their attempt to forestall conflict had the opposite effect, making me hopping mad. Even so, the scanner itself is such a delight that I can't help but recommend it. Once I'm done with this article I plan to test the latest version, called PaperPort.

Although growth in the PC business is expected to come mainly from unsophisticated home users, you can't yet count on products to work properly, and companies' technical support systems are not ready for prime time. As Intel's Pentium goof-up demonstrates, these outfits don't understand the importance of making customers happy. Early last year, Gateway 2000, a leading PC maker, was giving busy signals to three-quarters of its estimated 40,000 daily calls from customers. When I needed help from Diamond Multimedia Systems, which makes the circuitry controlling my computer's video display, Diamond's phone system made me wait eight minutes just to leave a voicemail. Both companies provided me with rational and convincing explanations of their difficulties, but who cares? When your computer is down, you want help right away.

For solace I turned to a batch of new laptop PCs. First of my two favorites is Hewlett-Packard's slim OmniBook 600C, which weighs 4.6 pounds, including battery, power supply, modem, and external floppy drive. The 600C is the successor to a laptop distinguished by an unmatched combination of functionality, affordability, and light weight. But the earlier version suffered from a dark monochrome screen and a keyboard whose space bar would not respond reliably to a normal bop of the thumb, resulting in annoyingly frequent runtogetherwords. (Do you suppose the marketers who create dumb run-together names are working on OmniBooks with bum space bars?) The new model offers a color screen and an improved keyboard while retaining the best qualities of the old design.

If you can wait, by all means hold out for IBM's 701C ThinkPad, the most impressive laptop I've ever seen. A miracle of smart design, the machine fits a handsome ten-inch color screen, a 720-megabyte hard drive, and a desktop-quality keyboard into a slim unit, smaller than a sheet of typing paper, that weighs 5.7 pounds with essential cables and gear. Like the H-P, it's small enough to pop into your briefcase--so you can junk the dorky little suitcase with the IBM logo.

IBMers call this ThinkPad the Butterfly in honor of its amazing keyboard. Until now, fitting a powerful PC into a trim case has meant shrinking the keyboard far smaller than humans find comfortable. The ThinkPad's keyboard is closer to desktop size. As you close the machine's cover, the keyboard splits in two and swivels under the lid; reopen the case, and the keyboard spreads its wings again. Expect lines around the block when this baby goes on sale later this year.

Travelers who can't get a Butterfly may still indulge themselves with the Pereos tape drive from Datasonix. This tiny, ingenious device, which weighs ten ounces, can copy up to a gigabyte of data--that's 1,000 megabytes, folks, far more than most desktop PCs can hold-onto a tape cassette hardly bigger than a stack of postage stamps. With the Pereos in your suitcase, you can bring all the files in your office computer wherever you go--and readily access them by plugging the drive into the printer port on your laptop. Caveats: I needed lots of help from technical support to install the needed software, and the product proved incompatible with the H-P laptop.

Anyone who wants to check E-mail or send files from abroad will benefit from an acoustic coupler like the Konexx from Unlimited Systems. The plugs needed to connect modems directly to phone lines vary from country to country; a complete global set--available from the Magellan travelers' catalogue (800-962-4943)--costs $495. I prefer an acoustic coupler, which Magellan offers for $130: It provides a crude but effective way to connect your modem to almost any phone via the handset.

For your desktop, the handiest device I tested was Seiko Instruments' Smart Label Printer Pro. This small, popular gadget does one thing only: print adhesive labels that can be used to address envelopes, mark file folders, stick to kids' foreheads, and so on. Anyone who has tried to laser-print envelopes, or seen how gummed labels can bollix up a printer's inner workings, can appreciate the benefits of such a machine; Seiko's performs its specialized task very well. The included software makes it easy to store addresses for reuse and access addresses transferred from a word processor or database.

The software that has changed my life most profoundly is Quicken, Intuit's famous personal-finance program. Since my wife and I began to write checks in joint sessions at the computer, we argue about money less. That's because Quicken shows us unambiguously the exact state of our financial accounts. Regularly facing that information got us to change our behavior and take control of our finances, much as companies sometimes motivate workers to reengineer by showing them once secret profit-and-loss statements.

We don't use CheckFree, Quicken's online service that lets you pay bills electronically. I'm squeamish about sharing so much highly personal data--every single check I write-with a company that might find other uses for the information. Now that Microsoft is poised to buy Intuit, my reluctance increases. If anybody can find ways to make money from that data, it's Bill Gates; much as I admire him, I don't want my bank account in his database.

As computers move into the home, kids' software becomes an important category. Most of it is junk. That's why I am delighted that our 8-year-old son, Spencer, whose PC holds hundreds of megabytes of programs from encyclopedias to games, declares Microsoft's Creative Writer one of his favorite programs. On the surface, Creative Writer is just a word processor with a cartoony interface that kids can master simply by "clicking around." But Gates once described the program to me as "deep," and the word is well chosen. Creative Writer includes drawing tools, easy-to-use libraries of pictures and sound effects that can be combined with text, icons that translate your words into secret code or add corny jokes (The Jesse James Story by Robin Banks), and an idea generator that works like a Las Vegas slot machine to juxtapose phrases at random: "The quiet knight / planted flowers / into an intense brushfire." The program is engaging and fun, but what's remarkable is that Spencer actually uses it for creative writing. His recent opus, "The Case of the Missing Money," is a four-page mystery with this powerful premise: "Tom and I are pretty much ordinary kids except that we're pretty good detectives." Step aside, Raymond Chandler!

My personal favorite--perhaps the most useful productivity software available today--is IBM's superior operating system, OS/2. The job of an operating system, whether OS/2 or Microsoft's DOS and Windows, is to mediate between a PC's hardware and applications software such as Lotus 1-2-3. That job is so crucial that you should think carefully before making a switch. The best approach is to get the program preinstalled when you buy your next PC, leaving the drudgery of systems integration to your supplier. OS/2's main shortcoming is not technical flaws but small market share: Although the new Warp version is selling fast, total sales of OS/2 amount to only six million copies, vs. more than 80 million for Windows. Makers of some fine products, including LapLink, are reluctant to invest money making sure they work with OS/2.

So why consider OS/2 at all? Because it makes your computer a much more effective servant. Its point-and-click user interface is easier to use than Windows' and more powerful. Under the hood, OS/2 provides true multitasking, the ability to run many programs simultaneously, whether written for DOS, Windows, or OS/2.

Impatient people, who gravitate most naturally to computers, can download e-mail and files from the office, for instance, while simultaneously searching a hard disk for a remembered phrase, loading a spreadsheet program, printing one memo, and writing another. At last, software that can walk and chew gum. Best of all, when your computer crashes--and crash it will, even with OS/2--this operating system daintily saves all your work before collapsing to the floor. For the first time since you started using PCs, your data are safe.

This is PC technology at its best--practical appliances that expand our sense of the possible. Now all I need is a better way to communicate with those space aliens.

Strat Sherman's E-mail address is 76330.540@compuserve.com