Also, quite often once it is left alone, when I come back, it will not wake back up.... requiring a hard reboot.
Back around that time period some systems were having issues with power management with hibernation. You can try setting it to never go to sleep. But the issue here is that the netbook is weak. I have a netbook myself with a 1.66Ghz Atom N280 ( 1 single physical core with 1 hyperthread acting like 2 cores ) and its quite slow.
Its processing benchmark is the equivalent of a Pentium 4 2.53Ghz with Integrated graphics. Additionally back in the day i use to play youtube on it in 360p and it would be somewhat ok, but these days it chokes on video streaming etc. I bought my netbook around the same time November 2009 on a black friday deal. Modern computing is a bit much for it 7 years later for an already weak CPU then 7 years ago, its that much weaker today to handle todays processing needs as everything becomes more complex and CPU processor hungry.
One thing you can try to get this laptop fixed if its more problems then it just freezing after walking away from it is, create restore media or use restore media on it and set it back to clean build just as the day you bought it and first turned it on, then perform all updates and maybe that will help.
But when it comes to the Intel Atom processors, they are quite weak. You might want to buy a new computer or a refurb that is more powerful. What type of stuff do you need to run on the computer? ( Such as if you into graphic design or programming or CAD or anything requiring lots of computer use, you definitely will want to get a faster computer to make for better productivity of your time vs having to crawl on a slow computer.