Why does my hard disk keep failing?

I've had my late 2009, white Macbook running Snow Leopard since February 2010 and in the two years I've had it the 'Macintosh HD' has broken three times. One time an application told me to download Adobe shockwave which totally messed it up and it would barely stay on for five minutes and the second and third times were seemingly unprovoked. The first two times I lost all my files - I'm fifteen and I can't afford to buy expensuve backing up software to back up a laptop that I already saved for a long time to buy.
I had another problem that I think was an unrelated hardware problem, but once every hour or so, the screen would become pixelated, freeze and fade to white, only changing back if you moved it. It seemed to sort itself out but it was pretty concerning.
I had to reset it again this morning after running disk utility which told me that the hard disk could not be repaired. I figured this might be imminent so my files are all safely backed up, but I'm not particularly amused and doubt this is normal for a Mac seeing as no one would spend £800 on something that you have to reset annually. I was wondering if some way I'm using my Mac is causing it to do this. I'm careful with my space used and I rarely have under 170 GB free, so I don't think it's my files. Maybe I've just got a faulty computer? Any ideas?

I take it that you have a 250GB hard drive in it?
With that much free space, I would think that your HD should be fairly trouble free. Only thing that I can think of that would cause an issue is improperly shutting down constantly. And you should restart your computer at least once a month or so, but either of these things are likely to have caused corruption bad enough to take down the drive. I guess it is possible that your drive has some bad sectors, you might want to run a more comprehensive drive utility than Disk Utility. Disk Warrior for example.

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