Why does my MacBook Pro contantly freeze?

I have the latest MacBook Pro that I bought on August 4th, 2009. It has 2.66 Ghz processor, 4GB RAM DDR3 RAM, and Snow Leopard. It freezes and the cursor does the little swirly color wheel thing a lot more than I would expect, and lately it has been doing it even more often. When it does the color wheel thing, I can't do anything until it stops swirling and it usually lasts about 30 seconds. It is very annoying because when it gets over it, if I am watching a video or listening to music it starts playing where it would have been if it hadn't stopped. So I have to rewind it to see the 30 seconds that it didn't play. Today while I was watching a few episodes of The Office on my laptop (on my computer, not streaming), it did this more than 5 times. They are not high quality and nothing is running in the background (not even with the little white dots under the logos on the dock). Is this normal for my Mac to do that this much?



I also have noticed that my Mac seems very hot, but I don't know how hot is too hot and a quick Google search made me more confused than before, but thinking that these are high for doing not much. I have the iStat dashboard widget and find it interesting to look at whats going on from time to time. I also have been looking at it right after the little pauses. The RAM never full and CPU is never working too hard, but the CPU temp after I got through watching The Office was 160+ (don't remember exactly, %26lt; 165) degrees F (71.1+ C, 73.8 C). Right now the only thing open is Safari and a finder window, nothing minimized, and the CPU temp is going up and down from 148 to 151 F (64.4 to 66.1 C). The other day I was watching a higher quality MKV video and paused it and left it on my bed for a while, and when I remembered that I had left my computer on I went back and it sounded like a weed eater. It was 170 F (76.6 C) and the fans were at 5000+ RPM. I am not sure if these are abnormal or not, or if they are in anyway related to the pausing problem. Just adding these just in case.

So, does your Mac do the spiny color wheel thing that much? Should I look into this problem further? Are these temperatures too hot, and in anyway related?

ThanksWhy does my MacBook Pro contantly freeze?
You left it on your bed, which I'm assuming is blankets, which means you covering the vents and cooking that sucker. You may have very well started destroying the hardware in your computer. I'd take the laptop to the apple techs before it gets worse and out of warranty.
You might be infected with a virus. The spinny color wheel means the computer is doing something.Why does my MacBook Pro contantly freeze?
you sure thats not you screen saver?
I don't have the answer to this, but mine does exactly the same thing. its a 13"mbp 2.53ghz 4gb. Im thinking it may be a hardware fault, as it still did it after fresh installs of both leopard and snow leopard. I've got the istat menus installed which is different from the dashboard version as it has all the figures on the bar at the top so i can constantly see the usage bars. The weird thing is when it freezes the cpu drops to zero and the the incoming and outgoing internet traffic also drop to zero for about 15 - 30 secs then just resumes like normal. Im pretty confused surely it would be freezing if i were using some app that was cpu intensive. So i think ill get in touch with apple and properly have to send it in for repair:(Why does my MacBook Pro contantly freeze?
The most likely cause is a bloated registry which has become the home for all kinds of useless bits and pieces of data. Whenever any change is made to the system settings or a program is installed or uninstalled, a new entry is generated in the registry. The operating system while running your computer has to pick its way through all this excess material. There is a multitude of useless bits and pieces to be removed.Parts of uninstalled programs,parts of incompletely installed programs,dead drivers and many other things. clean your registry and remove all the useless data fragments and no longer needed information to fix the freeze error! I should like to commend Registry Easy http://make-a-computer-run-better.com to you ! You can try ! Good luck!