A victory for the 'non-nerds': simplified technology.

Ever tried to enter your password on your microwave?

Does your mother clog up your e-mail inbox with JPEG files of her dog?

Do you pull up in your driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone's home?

Do you have a hard time staying in touch with family members who don't have e-mail?

Is your idea of cleaning up the dining room removing the fast-food bags from the backseat of your car?

If you answered "yes" to two or more of those questions, you're suffering from two common maladies afflicting Americans in the 21st century: technological exhaustion and time deprivation. Often they're related: You may not have time to master the 39 buttons on your new telephone because you're trying to download a software update on your new personal computer.

Computer and electronics manufacturers are at least aware, if not concerned, about the technological weariness that has befallen previously gizmo-happy Americans. Those concerns were on display at the recent Comdex show in Las Vegas, the gigantic computer trade show where, the joke goes, 200,000 technology geeks show up with one shirt, one idea and one $20 bill that they don't gamble with.

One digital camera manufacturer at the show said he worried that people won't be snapping up the filmless photography devices because it's too hard to extract images from them. Some sort of hardware is needed to convert the electronic impulses inside the camera to paper or a screen. The camera manufacturers' research showed that most households seem to have one computer expert who sets up the e-mail account, downloads plug-ins and handles all the other complicated PC functions. That person may not have the time or patience to download photography software and order prints via the Web or wait for the picture to be printed out.

At Comdex, there was plenty of evidence that electronic-device companies are coming up with ways to circumvent the personal computer. Some, for example, demonstrated desktop printers that print photos without using a computer. Others demonstrated doohickeys that can be attached to television sets to view photos taken with digital cameras.

Non-geeks who find their personal computers complex and frustrating should take heart with talk at Comdex about Internet appliances -- inexpensive boxes attached to high-bandwidth networks that can perform a few simple, well-defined tasks with uniform controls. Internet appliances may well put an end to the ubiquity of the personal computer -- and cost a lot less.

One company showed a disc drive that attaches to a personal computer and uses storage discs that have software embedded in them. All one has to do is pop the storage disk into the drive, and information about what to do next pops up on the screen. No muss, no fuss, no download annoyances, no confusion about where to store the file.

Wireless devices also may take some of the complexity out of creating and transmitting information. When wireless technology gets going, people may be able to point and click on their laptops to print out documents or photos without the hassle of trying to figure out where the USB port is -- or even trying to figure out what the USB port is. There was a lot of talk at Comdex about wireless, but, as one demonstrator put it, "Wireless is still so not there yet."

So, for those of us tired of trying to remember 15 numbers for our families of three, there's still hope that technology will get simpler and less time-consuming. Call it the revenge of the non-nerds.