Old folks remember the Model T Ford, popular in the 1920s, and available in one color: black. People called it the tin Lizzie. To start it, you had to get out in front and crank the engine. The crank sometimes spun backward and broke your arm. Doctors could always recognize a “Ford fracture.”

Cars were like that for quite a while; even after they had electric starters, you had to “retard the spark” and pull out the choke to adjust the timing and the fuel mixture to make starting easier. You were supposed to hold your left hand out the window to signal a turn or a stop. On a showery day, you often put chains on the back wheels. Driving was mostly men’s affair, and they practically had to be engineers.

Today, of course, cars have automatic gear shifts and stopping lights, snow tires and anti-lock brakes, air bags and temperature control plus numerous other functions that operate without the need of the driver to do anything. They make driving easier and safer.

Not so with personal computers. Try to do anything more complicated than turn it on and you can quickly find yourself in a circular debate that will neither give you access to the program you need nor let you proceed without access. It’s a less painful version of getting hit with a car crank. That new desktop model that came for Christmas may have picked up dozens of viruses, spams, adware and spyware and they keep accumulating more of that trash.

That laptop may have its own unique bugs. The manufacturers keep sending them out as works in progress while they work at devising corrective programs that they can send along later. The personal computer is one of the few consumer products for which an extended warranty is probably economical.

Such crankiness gets encouragement from Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal’s computer wizard. The first sentence in his first column 13 years ago went: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.” Three weeks ago, he conceded computers and the stuff that goes with them had become much more stable and far more simple to operate.

Then came the bad news: “But for the vast part of the public whose computers aren’t bought and deployed by corporate computer departments, things have gotten much worse lately.” He focused on the current “assault from an international criminal class of virus and spyware writers, hackers and sleazy businesses,” which require a lot of add-on programs to combat those evils.

It’s high time for outrage. Why can’t computers be more like cars? Do we have to wait 60 or 70 years? Most folks don’t want to have to learn a lot of fancy tricks. They just want to turn on the computer and use it.

Mr. Mossberg has no overall solution to the sloppy inadequacies of the compute business. All what’s left for us is to complain, complain, complain. As Karl Marx might have put it, “Klutzes of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your exasperation!”