[ubuntu] PC shutdown, adaptor/USB port problems

I've had this laptop for almost 8 months, and it has randomly tued off (just clicked off out of the blue) 3 times. I believe the first time it overheated, but the other two times it did not. I've noticed the sudden shut down only occurs when I have not rebooted or shut down the laptop manually in at least 2 weeks, using suspend intermittently. I also notice in 16.04 that the longer I use the keel without rebooting, the less healthy it becomes: for example, my wireless adaptor which is coected to a USB port (Since the inteal one sucks) will randomly lose power when I move the laptop. This loss of power won't occur within the first few days (usually) of using the keel except specific keels which I avoid altogether), but occurs most often when I have moved the laptop or changed position and almost never when just sitting still.

dmesg records this:

[17284.537387] ath: phy1: Chip reset failed
[17284.537390] ath: phy1: Unable to reset chael (2437 Mhz) reset status -22
[17284.537392] ath: phy1: Unable to set chael
[17284.547412] ath: phy1: Failed to wakeup in 500us
[17284.657673] ath: phy1: Failed to wakeup in 500us

I am trying to figure out what hardware piece is responsible for the shut downs and why. I can avoid them just by rebooting my laptop every couple days which isn't a problem since the latest keel only has a 50% chance of resuming from suspend without crashing (a problem I've been having with most of 16.04, really).

Any ideas?

There are also no logs anywhere about anything happening system-side after a shut down occurs so I assume it is hardware related.

Processor: Intel (i5)-2500u
I am using that as graphics as well because the nvidia driver hasn't worked for me since 16.04.

I have 8GB of memory and an HDD hard drive which is reported as healthy according to smart data.