The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn’t get her new Dell computer to turn on. Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer Corp. technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked the woman what happened when she pushed the power button.

Personal-computer makers are discovering that it’s still a low-tech world out there. While they are finally having great success selling PCs to households, they now have to deal with people to whom monitors and disk drives are as foreign as another language.

“It is rather mystifying to get this nice, beautiful machine and not know anything about it,” says Ed Shuler, a technician who helps field consumer calls at Dell’s headquarters here. “It’s going into unfamiliar territory,” adds Gus Kolias, vice president of customer service and training for Compaq Computer Corp. “People are looking for a comfort level.”

Only two years ago, most calls to PC help lines came from techies needing help on complex problems. But now, with computer sales to homes exploding as new “multimedia” functions gain mass appeal, PC makers say that as many as 70% of their calls come from rank novices. Partly because of the volume of calls, some computer companies have started charging help-line users.

The questions are often so basic that they could have been answered by opening the manual that comes with every machine. One woman called Dell’s toll-free line to ask how to install batteries in her laptop. When told that the directions were on the first page of the manual, says Steve Smith, Dell director of technical support, the woman replied angrily, “I just paid $2,000 for this stupid thing, and I’m not going to read a book.”

“I’ve pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens,” the woman replied. “Foot pedal?” the technician asked. “Yes,” the woman said, “this little white foot pedal with the on switch.” The “foot pedal,” it turned out, was the computer’s mouse, a hand-operated device that helps to control the computer’s operation.