nearly freezes when surfing only hard shutdown helps

When I use my ca. 6 year old MacBook white (10.6.8, 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM) to surf the internet with Chrome, it sometimes happens that I'm not able to load new tabs and even in existing tabs Chrome doesn't receive Data. If I wait long enough Chrome tells me, that the site is not responding (even if I close it manually this message appears again).

When this occurs my courser changes into the colorful umbrella and I cant do anything more than performing a hard shutdown by holding the power button for 10 seconds.

Is this a common problem and how can I fix it?