MBP Constantly Locking Up

I couldn't find a sufficient answer for this by searching. I have the 15" Mid Summer 2009 MBP. 2.8ghz with the 512mb graphics card, 4gb ram etc etc. For the past few months, it has been locking up like crazy. Sometimes once a day, today, it locked up constantly for the last half hour. I've been keeping activity monitor on, and usually its Firefox, which shoots up to 100% cpu sometimes, but it's not just Firefox. Adium does it too, as well as some other programs. Usually, if I wait about 30 seconds, it goes away on it's own. It's happened while I've been doing nothing but in the middle of a YouTube video as well. This happened when I had Leopard, and has continued since I upgraded to Snow Leopard. This is getting unbearable. My machine is totally fast and never lags except when it gets these complete lock-ups. I have no idea what's causing this. Any help? Thanks.

I agree with dwd about the question of 3rd party RAM. But clearly you stated that it is Apple RAM
But I am also curious if you have the EFI 1.7 Firmware running on the MBP.
Here how you can verify if you do have the EFI 1.7 Firmware update.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237
This update cause havoc with A-LOT of 13" & 15" MBP's it was suspected to only effect MBP's that had upgraded to a 3rd party HDD that was SATA 3.0. But the reality was it did effect stock Macs and SATA 1.5 drives.
Just food for thought.
If you do not believe that this is an issue then lets continue.
1. Run "Verify Disk" and "Repair Permission" from Disk Utilities. If "Verify Disk" returns errors then you will need to boot with the OSX install DVD to attempt repair.
Also while you're in DU "First Aid" at the bottom note the drives S.M.A.R.T status it should read "Verified".
2. Download a program such as AppleJack or ONYX ( I suggest both) and use them to clean system Cache files and run the UNIX scripts "Daily, Weekly, Monthly".
3. You might also log into another user and see if this problem exist under that user. If you don't have another user then simply create one in System/Prefs/Users.
4. If none of these works than I would look at the possibility that your RAM or HDD is dying. I would recommend creating a back up as soon as possible.
If you have an external drive? You could load OSX on it and boot from it to see if the problem exist then. Or if you have another Mac you could utilize Target Disk Mode and boot from it to verify your hardware.

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