Laptop keeps freezing up

Hello,

Recently, my laptop has been freezing up to the point where I have been generally unable to use it for any real purpose. It is a Dell DV7 with 6GB RAM and i5 processor @ 2.27 GHZ. It's been a great computer since I bought it over a year ago; however, a few months ago I noticed for the first time that occasionally, usually when I wasn't doing anything on it (gone to the washroom or something for a short period of time), I'd sometimes come back and it would be frozen. I didn't really do anything about it initially and blew it off, yet it started happening more and more frequently until lately it happens multiple times a day. My first thought was malware/bad programs yet nothing new was installed since it started acting up and I have ran numerous different scans with different AV's and all is clean. I'm almost 100% certain there are no viruses causing this.

After this I started monitoring the Event Viewer; yet nothing was there to indicate any problems.

My next thought was this was probably due to overheating, which I could see as a large possibility because I use my computer a lot with high performance settings. I checked the SMARTS and temps of the HDD, Cores, GPU and general Temp, and although the general temp was at about 60 Celsius and Cores were in the 50s, along with a GPU at around 50, everything seemed fine. My HDD is perfect, ran various diagnostics on that and it runs perfectly. I also always keep my laptop on a cooling pad with two fans.

This really stumped me when it kept freezing because I have no idea why it's doing this. Everything runs perfectly smoothly on my computer but randomly out of no where it will freeze. I have also monitored to see if any program begins to run or take up resources, or if the CPUs start acting up, or if there is an increase in temperature but nothing is out of the ordinary. Nothing comes up in Event Viewer to suggest any issues that could be causing it.

This caused me to boot in safe mode and see if anything would go wrong there and sure enough, even in safe mode it would freeze.

Please, if anyone knows what else I can do to fix it or at least isolate the problem, that would be great!

Thanks.