You're watching the "Friends" finale on TV when you remember that you're waiting for an urgent e-mail. No need to get up. You set the TV to record, switch the screen to the Internet, and respond to your message. After watching the rest of "Friends," you switch the screen back to your computer, where you're organizing a slide show of pictures from your Alaska vacation last summer. You pipe in a little Jimmy Buffett cruising music from your CD collection, which you have stored on the PC.

That's a taste of "convergence" or "the digital home," buzzwords that stand for having a house full of digital devices that talk to one another and easily send video, audio, or other information wherever you want them.

It's an enticing prospect. "We quickly get the idea of connectivity. It doesn't take much selling," says Brian Cooley, editor at large at CNET (www.cnet.com), an Internet site that reviews thousands of high-tech products.

"More people want the ability to have their content available anytime, anywhere, and on any device," says Louis Burns, a vice president of Intel Corp., the world's largest computer chipmaker, which has a big stake in the success of "the digital home."

"They want to wirelessly transfer MP3 files from a PC in the den so they can listen to them on their stereo in the family room; they want to view digital photos on their big-screen TV, or to watch video content on hand-held wireless devices."

To see what the convergence buzz was all about, I took a test-drive of a Gateway Family Room Media Center or FMC 901 ($999), a PC that runs Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. (The Yankee Group, which watches the home electronics industry, projects that 22 percent of PCs sold in the US in 2007 are going to be media center PCs.) Gateway let me borrow one, and I took it home. Opening the box, I found a sleek metallic box with cool blue lights on its controls, meant to look like a VCR, DVD player, or stereo receiver, something that belongs in your living room or den.

It's actually much more. It works happily with devices like digital cameras and MP3 players, records TV shows onto its hard drive, plays or records DVDs, pulls music off the Internet (a one-month free trial to Napster.com is included), and plays video games. Many functions are controlled with a TV-type remote. With its wireless keyboard and mouse, the FMC 901 is also a all-purpose PC, capable of working on word processing or surfing the Internet.

So, was it wonderful?

Actually, it reminded me of Longfellow's poem about the little girl with a curl on her forehead: "When she was good/ She was very, very good/ But when she was bad she was horrid." Once the system was set up and operating, it was a lot of fun and fairly intuitive to use. But before long, either I did something to throw it off or it mysteriously balked on its own.

CNET's Cooley suggests that users' experiences may be determined by the world from which they approach the project. People accustomed to working with PCs, he says, "expect to have to fiddle with a system to get it to work right." But he concedes they are in the minority. Most people still expect to bring home a piece of consumer electronics, which this is trying to be, plug in a wire or two, and use it.

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