Maintaining healthy computer chemistry is a somewhat more complex and mysterious matter. As you know if you read this column regularly, I just bought a Toshiba Satellite 1955-S801 notebook computer with Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled. After a mere six weeks of daily use — without so much as a previous sniffle or sneeze — it caught a cancerous cold and died on the spot. I mean dead, as in no pulse, period. On reboot, the hard drive would flicker briefly, but nothing would happen after that. Nada. This wasn’t the infamous Blue Screen of Death, but the Black Screen of Death.

Time to autopsy the corpse. My first step was to examine its stomach contents. What had it been eating? About everything at hand, apparently. Happy to have a new Wintel machine, I went on an eating binge, emboldened by XP’s reported cast-iron stomach reputation. For appetizers, there were software programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, MS Picture It! Digital Image Pro (don’t ask me why I thought I needed two picture editors), and MS Works Suite 2003, with its full working version of Word.

For some meat and potatoes, I added hardware in the form of a USB printer, scanner, and Zip drive, downloading their most current drivers off the Internet. For dessert, I added a wireless card and hooked the whole thing up to an Apple AirPort base station. This process caused the machine to utter its first burp. XP told me the driver for the wireless PC card wasn’t Windows certified , but I ate it anyway. By way of an after dinner armagnac, I added another 512MB of RAM.

The bill for this binge left me reaching for the Alker-Selzter. To cite the most egregious instance, the Toshiba boasted that it came with 512MB of RAM installed. So I shelled out about $350 for the specialized DDR memory the Satellite tech specs called for. When I went to install it, I learned that the 512MB of onboard RAM consisted of two 256MB chips. This meant that I had to pull one of the chips in order to install the new one. In effect, it cost me top dollar (about 350 of them) to add a mere 256MB of RAM.

I slept it off, though, and by the following morning the system seemed to have digested everything I’d thrown at it. About two weeks later, it hiccupped, belched, rolled over and died. To be completely honest, I won’t say that it was entirely without warning, just that the error messages that started showing up on screen were more cryptic and less helpful than most of the warning messages on prescription medicine labels.

Here’s a typical passage: “Run the driver verifier against any new (or suspect) drivers. If that doesn’t reveal the corrupting driver, try enabling special pool. Both of these features are intended to catch the corruption at an earlier point where the offending driver can be identified.”

And I had gotten a warning message earlier about a possibly corrupted video driver. Before I could do anything about it, however, the system crashed and had to be hard rebooted, usually into an error message screen like the one above, advising me to reboot in Safe Mode and choose Last Known Good Configuration.

Trouble was, these message screens were frozen, too, requiring another hard reboot. The Safe Mode screen wouldn’t come up by holding down the F8 key while rebooting, nor would the Satellite access the Restore CD when it was put in the drive. After several such hard reboots, the system died altogether. Nothing appeared on the screen.

Maybe it was the video driver, after all, I mused. A tech support call to Toshiba didn’t shed any light on the subject. I consigned myself to a full reinstall, which would be a major hassle and cost me some lost programs and data, but might at least hand me back a working machine. But without being able to see anything on screen, someone else was going to have to do it other than yours truly.

Happily, I wound up at a certified Toshiba repair shop on the north side. After listening to my description of the ailment, the attending surgeon said it might be the motherboard. Unlike most manufacturers, Toshiba stuck a desktop Pentium IV in some of their Satellite models, of which mine was one. Sometimes, he said, it fried the motherboard. Since it was still under warranty, I left it in his hands.

A couple of days later, my answering machine told me that the notebook was ready to pick up. Diagnosis? The 512MB chip of RAM I’d transplanted. They removed it and the Toshiba booted up like Lazarus, with no loss of data or programs.

If anything remotely like this happens to you, take two aspirin and don’t call me in the morning.  And don’t forget to put ketchup on your fries.