Macbook Pro (late 2008) freezes randomly, have to reinstall Mavericks to "fix" it I've been walking around with this problem for a mighty long time and it's really frustrating! I have no idea what the cause is…

I have a MacBook Pro (late 2008) totally updated to the latest version of Mavericks. My problem is that randomly, out of the blue, everything freezes (beach ball). I can't do anything at all. If I reboot and login to my account it freezes immediately again. I have to reinstall Mavericks to "fix" the problem every time! I've tried to look for people with similar problems online but I couldn't find anything. In the Apple Store they advised me to clear my hard-drive and then reinstall Mavericks. So been there, done that. I've tried resetting my PRAM, resetting SMC… No good. Starting up in safe-mode: It crashes immediately after logging in as well. I have no other choice but to reinstall Mavericks and simply wait for it to happen again. What I did notice is that whenever it freezes, Chrome is one of the running apps. The last time it froze was when I was working in Adobe Illustrator, and again: Chrome was one of the running apps. So maybe that's the cause? 

Is there anybody who knows what the problem is and how to fix it?
Personally, I'd assume you're looking at the machine either having bad RAM, causing the OS to corrupt and thus forcing the reinstall, or the machine having a bad hard drive, or at least one that's starting to fail.

For testing, I'd download a copy of Memtest86 (the free version) at http://www.memtest86.com/ , follow the directions to install it to a USB drive, and let it run through a few loops to check that the memory is okay.

If that comes back clean, the next culprit would be hard drive.  I'd suggest downloading the free trial version of Drive Genius from http://www.prosofteng.com/downloads/ and running your drive through its tests.  If it is a bad hard drive, replacement is easy enough, there are multiple guides on youtube as well as at iFixit that detail how to take your machine apart and replace the hard drive.  Good luck!