Slowly failing(?) mac, some help with diagnosing the issue.

Hi there, I'm wondering whether the community here would be so kind as to help me diagnose some issues that are afflicting my 2008 aluminium macbook. In the past 2-3 weeks 2 specific issues have come up that resurface at the least 2-3 times a day and require a reboot.
1) The wifi decides to turn off after the laptop is woken from sleep and refuses to turn back on until the macbook is rebooted. This also less frequently occurs while the computer is running too.
2) During normal use without any program in specific the laptop freezes and refuses to do anything. The mouse doesn't moving, nothing works basically. Closing the lid keeps the screen on but allows the bottom sleep light to work but when opened still remains frozen and the only thing that helps is a manual reboot.

I've tried a completely fresh install of 10.8.5 with a full wipe of the HDD but it doesn't seem to have helped. If this info is of any necessity then my macbook is running on its original 2008 Hitachi 160GB HDD and 4GB of RAM.

Can anyone deduce what the problem is, is it my HDD/logic board/wifi failing from what I've let on? If theres any other information that I could provide to help figure this out please let me know. I could do with a HDD replacement as I'm planning on getting a Samsung 840 EVO, or even if the wifi was failing i could get a tiny USB one, but a Logic board failure would be killer.

Thanks for the help in advance!

First things first.... Check the hard drive by booting to your recovery partition and running Disk Utility. Verify the hard drive and also repair permissions while you're there. Let us know the results.

It's unlikely that the logic board is failing but there may be other problems. First, however, is to check that hard drive since it's an original.

Hi,
Forgot to add this but I have already verified and repaired the hard drive multiple times before as well as after the wipe and reinstall. All times it didn't show any issues and the repair didn't change anything unfortunately. I've tried almost anything I could have thought of or found online but still can't seem to get to the bottom of it. Hoping it was software related I ran Onyx but that didn't help either.

The fact that you repaired and verified the hard drive multiple times is an indication of a drive that's failing. Back up everything as soon as possible and replace the drive before it goes completely down. Use Time Machine or any other means of backing up that you have on hand.

I suspected as much. Just to return somewhat to my earlier question - would a failing hard drive mess with my wifi as it has? I'm hoping it can because otherwise I'm not too keen on replacing the HDD if the wifi issues would persist.

Either way, thanks for the response!

It's difficult to say what impact the failing hard drive is having on the WiFi or any other aspect of the system. Unfortunately, we really have no way of finding that out until you replace the defective drive and restore the operating system. Your MacBook is of 2008 vintage but is the only aluminum MacBook made by Apple so may be worth taking a chance on replacing the hard drive. Of course that's entirely up to you.

Thanks for the advice, I think I'll be heading down the hard drive upgrade route. Since it's held up so well, aesthetically and overall speed wise over the last several years I would like to keep it up and running in top shape for as long as I can, maybe also maxíng out the RAM to 8GB too.