2008 Macbook many issues

I have an aluminum unibody 2008 Macbook running Mountain Lion. It's been great to me, however it has been slowly getting worse and worse. When I say worse, I mean many little tasks just do not function as they should anymore. Sorry in advance for the long post.

Some symptoms:

-Not waking upon opening lid

-Waking upon opening lid but the screen brightness is all the way down, and no way to change it

-Wifi takes about a minute to connect every time it does awake

-Volume controls stop working, when I move the mouse up to the corner to try and see what is going on, the swirly disk appears.

-Date and time stops working, when I move the mouse up to the corner to try and see what is going on, the swirly disk appears.

-Finder doesn't really respond - Not able to force quit, restart, sleep, shut down, etc. I've tried to do this as a response to the date/time/volume malfunctions to no avail.

-Poor battery life - barely an hour off the charger (although this could just be the battery rather than computer issues)

-Bluetooth connection stops working (this has only happened once, it said there was no Bluetooth device connected)

-Running very hot and loud

Note: I have reset the SMC, this only helped temporarily.

These do not happen all the time (with the exception of the Wifi connection issues, that is pretty consistent), but they have been getting more and more common. The only way I can seem to get past these sometime dehabilitating issues (stuck on sleep) is to hold down the power button and force shut down. I know this is bad for the computer but what else can I do? In one instance the computer was stuck on sleep and after trying for 10 minutes to wake it, I had to shut it down. When I turned it back on, I was greeted with a rapid error noise (the "****" noise) that wouldn't stop and left the computer frozen. So I had to shut it down again.

I've had to forcefully shut it down at least two or three times just this week. Again, I have reset the SMC, this helped greatly for about two days, then the problems started creeping back. Now I can't go a day without noticing at least one of the problems I mentioned on the list above.

Any advice? Is the computer just slowly dying? I know every computer has a lifespan, so is this the end for my computer?