did my repair compromise my system?

I bought a new laptop last year HP dv6149us from Circuit City. Had it repaired once. Ever since then it will not run software properly. It keeps freezing and crashing. The manufacturer said to do a disk refrag on what is supposed to be a new harddrive to fix the system. this does not sound ok with me.

also what does it mean when my bios says my "total memory" is 2048mb?"
Is this ram? or is this the actual memory. It is a new laptop with all the bells, whistles and memory of the latest centrino duo. And does the 1660 mhz processor speed sound right

I am just fishing to figure out why a supposedly new harddrive replacement will not run properly and cannot see to handle the processing of large code segments of software.
help?
S.Tim

 

a defrag should not fix freezes and crashing.

Yes, that is your RAM.
Yes, 1660mhz also sounds right.

I would run memtest86 on your memory to see if perhaps you have faulty memory. You could also run wprime to see if the CPU is stable running this. I would not stop at this though and would continue to run other stress testing apps to try to isolate the problem component.