Hardware Issues with my T61p

[SocialismNow]

I've been having some annoying hardware problems with my new T61p and they are really getting to me. The laptop is less than a year old and I am currently waiting on a new hard drive to come in the mail. Now this wouldn't annoy me as much if this was the first time but it's not. This is the second time in under a year that I have had to replace my hard drive. I talked to the customer support team and they told me to run PC Doctor after getting the laptop up and running but I am not sure if that'll find anything even if there is a problem. Also it should have dawned on me earlier that according to a RAM counter program that I have it's only counting 2 of the 4 gigs I have, and the load is like around 1-2%. Has anyone else been having similar problems? Please let me know if there are solutions to this hardware nightmare.

PS: The only thing I can think of as a reason the first hard drive died was due to too much heat from me playing BioShock. But why would this cause the second to die?

[basketb]

The reason that your program only sees 2 out of the 4 GB RAM can be two-fold:
1. One of the 2 GB sticks is faulty.
2. The slot on the motherboard where the stick sits is faulty.
3. both of the above (but this is somewhat unlikely)
You can troubleshoot this by using only one of the sticks in either of the slots. And if no problems arise, test the other one.

[Temetka]

I would download and run memtest.

This way you can test the memory for defects.

I am curious though: how much memory does the BIOS see if you were to check?

Since you are running 2 modules in the computer, are they the same speed and from the same manufacturer?