(FORTUNE Magazine) – Ted Larson arrives at geek headquarters smack in the middle of the much-awaited season premiere of UPN's latest Star Trek show, Enterprise. The former chief technical officer at an Internet startup, Larson sports blue jeans, a white Tech TV T-shirt, and loafers with white socks, and is carrying a large, tattered FedEx box that contains his own homemade, gyroscopically stabilized, self-balancing robot.

The other geeks introduce themselves. Dean Heistad, 36, is a director of technology in the information technology department of Time Inc., FORTUNE's publisher. Paul Ross, 32, owns Sound Integration Singular, an audio/video store in Coralville, a suburb of Iowa City. Larson, 37, details his own stellar geek credentials. His favorite geek movie is Videodrome, starring Debbie Harry; his robot, which he designed with a friend from robot club, balances using a gyroscope, a two-axis accelerometer, and motor feedback. Few others have figured out how to do it, he boasts.

Larson turns the robot on. A row of green and yellow lights begins blinking. Suddenly the three-tiered, Leaning Tower of Pisa--esque contraption stands straight up and starts scurrying around the room like R2-D2 gone berserker. "All the robot guys at the robot fair were like, 'Whoa!'" Larson says of his recent trip to the San Francisco Robot Expo. " 'No way! I can't believe you got that to work!' "

The geeks have arrived.

This is no ordinary reunion of the nerds. These geeks--as different from nerds as orcs are from trolls--have been assembled as part of an audacious experiment: Can they deliver digital happiness to a small part of America and enable FORTUNE to ride the success of the hit reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?

Ride? Make that improve on. In the show, a straight guy gets new clothes, a redecorated apartment, a real haircut, and personal grooming tips. Yet in real life, it's pretty clear that guys and their families aren't looking for cleaner bathrooms and matching belt-shoe combos, but for gadgets. Plenty of gadgets. In the last quarter, Best Buy saw same-store sales rise almost 8% from the previous year; Wal-Mart, Target, and Kmart are also aggressively pushing into consumer electronics. But get some of these gadgets into your home, and Best Buyer's remorse quickly sets in: Did I buy the right DVD player? Why won't the wireless access point work with the PC? Do I have a PC? Which got us to thinking--fashion is fun and all, but wouldn't it be better if the Fab Five were a team of super-tech-savvy geeks who could solve these real problems?

Sure it would. So we assembled a Fab Three, headed by Heistad, and paired it with the most typically tech-less family we could find: the Burkes of Sterling, Va., who consist of a salesman father, a stay-at-home mother, and two small children. Heistad grilled them on their tech needs--really, all they wanted to do was send digital pictures of the kids to Grandma. Heistad came back with a shopping list that would get them that, plus a home theater, a wireless network, new computing, a tricked-out music system, and GPS positioning capabilities. FORTUNE's requirements: The products needed to be practical, easy to use, fully installed, basically idiot-proof, and very, very cool. We'd pick up the bill for the Burkes, paying a set media rate when companies offered it, retail when they didn't. (We let the geeks pick their own uniforms, though: They chose The Matrix: Reloaded T-shirts and Tevas.)

For three days the Fab Three took over the Burkes' home. And at the end, it was nearing digital nirvana. But, O, Fortuna! It is not so easy being geek.

DAY ONE

Mike and Jenny burke live in a two-story brick house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., with a pretty, postage-stamp lawn and a crape myrtle tree out front, and a little handwritten sign taped beside the door that reads DOORBELL DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK. [Smiley Face]

Mike, 38, is a sales executive at Nextel who describes himself as "entertainment challenged" and can't program the VCR. His wife, Jenny, 37, checks her e-mail once a week and stacks random CDs behind the TV and on top of the dryer.

They have two kids: Sam, 4, likes to dress up in a Buzz Lightyear outfit that makes him look like a miniature Sta-Puft Marshmallow man with a purple Lycra hood, and run around the house hiding behind furniture. Alex, 2, enjoys throwing noodles on the floor.

You know them, maybe. Maybe they are you: the kind of family who, when they want to go online, strings a long, gray phone cord in a sagging waist-high arc from the back of their computer in the den to the jack 15 feet away in the kitchen. So the first order of business for the Burkes--as for anyone joining the digital era--was to get high-speed Net access. Before descending on the house, the geek team arranged for Verizon to install DSL.

On Wednesday morning the team members--minus Larson, who shows up later that night--introduce themselves and get to work on their favorite gadget, the Yamaha MusicCast server. This is a seriously cool device: It can convert 1,000 CDs into digital files, store them, and send the music wirelessly to small MusicCast "client" stereos around the house--in this case, the study, the den, and the downstairs playroom. At least that's the idea. Heistad and Ross attempt to hook the server up to the Net, but are having problems making it work wirelessly. The discussion about the problem sounds suspiciously as though they are speaking Swahili. One thing becomes clear: The thing does not do what they want it to do the way they want it to do it. Fine. The Burkes will never know, anyway.

The geeks start feeding CD after CD into the Yamaha, and pretty soon the room fills with Jenny's music. "Yeah!" says Ross. "We're rocking out to .38 Special!"

Jenny is not rocking out. Mike is out of town until late Thursday night, leaving her with two geeks, two photographers, a reporter, and two kids on her hands--not to mention a houseful of new stuff she needs to understand before they leave.

In the family room, she changes Alex's diaper while Sam watches Dora the Explorer. After a while he snaps away from the TV's grip. "Mom?" he says, in an inquisitive tone, "Maybe I want a sundae?"

DAY TWO

The now fully assembled geek team pulls up to the Burkes' house at 9 A.M. Outside is a white FedEx semi--a huge hulking white semi--and a delivery man wheeling a Panasonic 42-inch plasma TV up to the doorstep. It gets added to the mountain of unopened electronics that takes up most of the Burkes' front hallway. The stack looks, as Jenny says, "like Christmas."

The first thing that everyone wants to play with is the Canon s400 digital camera. Larson is the resident gadget hound. He explains why he thought this was the the best camera for the family: First, it's cool-looking, and one of the smallest four-megapixel versions that takes compact flash memory. But more important, it's great for the kid-pix-loving Burkes because there's no delay between the time you press the button and when the camera actually takes the picture (this is a problem with lots of digital cameras--especially when taking photos of 2-year-olds).

Jenny explains that she has shied away from digital cameras because she really likes to make photo albums and receive pictures in the mail, not by e-mail. The solution: The geeks trot out a Canon i900D photo printer that produces high-quality photos as well as color and black-and-white documents.

They print a photo of Sam eating.

Next up: getting the Apple PowerBook G4 to work. It connects to the DSL wirelessly, using Apple's AirPort Extreme, which plugs into the DSL router. (The product name throws Jenny off a bit: "Airport? My husband is at the airport," she says to Heistad.) The installation is simple--since the two are made to be compatible--but crucial: It is the first step toward maximum wirelessness.

The geeks also decided to get another PC for the study and designate the existing four-year-old Pentium-chip Dell in the den as the kids' computer.

Throughout the Burkes' digital makeover, the kids are a major consideration. The laptop that Jenny can use to check her e-mail in bed, for example, can also double as a DVD player for use on long car trips. Kids need their own PC if possible, Larson explains, "because kids' software has, like, this uncanny knack for wrecking a PC. They introduce all kinds of weird fonts, and the thing just crashes all the time."

There isn't time to order a new PC from Dell--the geeks' PC maker of choice--so they head to Best Buy and pick up a $679 HP Pavilion Home PC. The major selling point: a front-access six-in-one media-card reader. That means you stick the memory cards and USB cords into your machine right there in the front as with a disk drive. But there's more: The PC sports a 2.08GHz XP processor, 512 MB of memory, and a 120GB hard drive, plus a CD-RW and a DVD-ROM drive. On the way out they pick up a MAG Innovision 17-inch CRT monitor for a hundred bucks, hop in the Chevy Malibu rental, and floor it back to the Burkes'.

The PC is a snap to set up. Larson immediately begins installing the software for the gadgets. Then he pops open the machine--an easy task--and installs a D-Link Wireless Ethernet Card, which allows the machine to attach wirelessly to the Burkes' new network. Larson is the only guy in the bunch who actually reads directions. He is also the most excitable. "This front part is hot!" he says of the PC's media reader. "It is the hot key! I'm diggin' it!"

Also hot, though with incredibly cold names: the Linksys EtherFast five-port switch and a Linksys Wireless Ethernet Bridge. (Those in the know refer to the last item as a "Wet 11." Naturally.) The switch connects the Dell to the AirPort. The bridge solves the MusicCast's wireless problem, allowing it to join the home network.

The only really big things left to set up are the small remote controls. The Harmony universal remotes are magic-wand-like pieces of equipment that claim to command every bit of techie gear in the house. The geeks have three but can't figure any out.

"This is certainly not as easy as the documentation suggests," says Ross. One hang-up: The remote must be programmed using different codes for each device. Many of those codes are stored online at the Harmony website, but because the Yamaha MusicCast is so new, no code is listed. Ross calls Harmony customer support, and after a few hours of phone tag gets them to list the Yamaha in their database. (This process is especially frustrating since the geeks' personal brand of choice is the Philips Pronto remote, which has a Palm-like LCD screen used for controlling devices. The team figured the Pronto was just too geeky and went Harmony, with its rows of traditional hard buttons. Mistake.)

By the time the remotes are ready, it's almost 10 P.M. Tired and slightly anxious about their impending deadline, the geeks load a map of the nearby area onto the Garmin iQue 600, a handheld PC with built-in GPS purchased for the Burkes. They use it to guide themselves home, even though they know the way.

DAY THREE

The pressure is on. Larson has to leave at 2 P.M., Ross at 5 P.M. The subject of the day is, of course, whether they can get the remotes done in time. It's not looking good. There are also the two TiVos and the home entertainment system left to set up.

At about 11 A.M., Heistad admits that with respect to the remotes they are "sucking wind, bad." The house is in chaos. The kids are everywhere. Heistad starts sweating through his shirt and has long since begun calling everyone "bitch." There is dissension in the ranks:

Heistad: "Call the guy [from customer service]! Say, 'This is really hard to understand! Can you please walk us through it?'"

Ross: "But--you should really be able to ..."

Heistad: "Call him, bitch!"

Adding to the pressure is the not-small task of teaching the Burkes how to work everything in so little time. Mike, who has been traveling for work all week, can get away for only two hours today, at lunchtime.

At noon he shows up. Mike is very much the sales guy. He is upbeat and apparently interested, though he has a tendency to cut explanations short by saying things like "Terrrrific!" and to fawn over his kids and the gadgets at the same time, as in, "Oooh! TiVo! Want to give daddy a kiss?"

The geeks start walking him through his house. Larson shows Mike how to hook his camcorder up to the PC and make movies that he can send to his brother in Japan. He explains the difference between "slurping" (video), "ripping" (music), and "shoving" (the camera's media card into the PC media server). Larson tells Mike that when he wants to print a photo, he should simply "connect the squiggly one to that thing-a-ma-doodle." (Larson also refers to the PC media reader as a "front-loading deelie bopper.")

Throughout, of course, Mike is thrilled. ("Terrrific!") Having DSL in his house is "a total miracle." After only a few minutes, he declares that "TiVo has already changed my life." ("Twilight Zone?" he says, scrolling through a list of shows he could now record. "Why wouldn't you tape all the Twilight Zones?")

Because Jenny had gently suggested earlier that Mike sometimes gets lost in D.C., the geeks take some time to show him the Garmin GPS unit, which he can't help but compare with the Hertz Neverlost system. ("She talks to you," Mike says of the in-car navigation system's computerized female voice. "She's nonjudgmental. She corrects you nicely if you screw up.")

In fact, despite being "so pre--Clinton era" in the realm of home electronics, Mike seems to be a quick study. At the end of the walk-through, he programs the Yamaha to play Heart's "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You" and imagines out loud the idyllic possibility of sitting at the table in their backyard with his wireless laptop, downloading big PDF files from work with no long delays.

Finally, in a state of shock and awe, he says: "Hey! We're going to bypass the 1990s and jump straight into the new millennium!"

"I can tell you're a wannabe tech guy," Larson say. "You're going to pick this all up pretty quick."

Mike beams.

As the day winds down, however, it becomes clear that the geeks are not going to get everything done. The plasma TV, DVD/VCR player, surround-sound speakers and speaker stands are a breeze for Ross to set up. But the remotes never quite work.

Instead of saddling the Burkes with a dud, Heistad makes a last-minute switch to the Prontos and offers to install them on his own time over the next couple of days. (Which he does: four hours on Saturday and a few more on Sunday, with plans to stop by a few times later during the week.)

And maybe that's what a perfectly seamless digital life requires. Not a limitless array of stuff, necessarily, but a lifetime supply of Heistad.

Toward the end of their time together, the geeks ponder over the lessons they might pass on to ambitious digital do-it-yourselfers. They pause. Ross fingers his goatee, and tentatively offers, "Don't expect it to be too easy?"

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