Just click the scales (between the green dot and the warning sign) under his name on the left...
BTW - im intreagued - are you still able to load windows when your problems start and what happens when you try to open a program that stops working?
In my experience a faulty hard drive would probably "blue screen" your machine and you would also probably hear quite a few "clicking" noises. Perhaps you mean that they recommended that you reinstall all the software on your harddrive using the recovery disk?
If so then some bit of software is causing it to fail and not hardware - in which case you might not need to send it off at all - just find the cause of the problem which we can help you with here.
Can you be more specific?