Late '08 MBP having MAJOR issues with Lion

I have a first-gen unibody machine as well. Instead of upgrading from Snow Leopard, I did a fresh install of Lion and it's running pretty smoothly. No issues here.

Do Fresh install. If your system is slow, the best way to improve would be fresh install.

I had the same issues until I did a clean install of Lion.

Of course, the clean install did not help with Lion's well-documented Wifi and Network problems.

I'm back on Snow Leopard now.

Any OS with first batch will have issues. If you are an early adapter, then you are obviously willing to take the risks. If you are not, then you should not be. First iPad had bunch of issues. Mac OS snow leopard also had bunch of issues with bootcamp. This one is no different.

Mine intermittently disconnects (wifi). I'm not sure what is causing it. Argh.

I did fresh install of SL then upgraded to Lion. My MBP is only 1.5 years old.

Glad the OP got his issues sorted out, but just to put my 2¢ in -

I've got at work a 2.4GHz 13" Unibody MacBook w/ 6GB of RAM. I did an upgrade install of Lion and it's been running perfectly smooth. Granted it also has a 120GB SSD instead of a mechanical HD which helps the speed tremendously, but regardless even non-disk based performance is quite good.

I upgraded my daughter's 13" MacBook Pro 2.26GHz (the model when the 13" first became a "Pro") from 10.6 with 2GB of RAM and old, slow 160GB HD to Lion after swapping in 8GB of RAM (only $70 so why not) and a 120GB SSD. She loves it. Lion was a clean install on this machine.

And lastly, my wife's black MacBook 2.4GHz (the model right before the aluminum unibody) is running 4GB RAM and a 120GB SSD and Lion does just perfectly on that machine as well. Clean installed Lion as well.

So, 3 laptops - all nearly very close in original specs (basically differ only by minor bus speed improvements and improved graphics processor), all running Lion very, very well.

I think Lion should run well on anything with over 2GB of RAM.

[Managed to snag three 120GB SSDs from OCZ from a friend for $160 each! Had to put them to good use!]

2GB, you are pushing it mate. no problem with my MB5,1 with 8GB... with OCZ SSD... Trim enabled... smooth aass

I have the same, but with 8GB ram. I upgraded from SL to Lion. it was smooth, except for Citrix bug, which was causing the high CPU usage. but i did notice slow boot and shutdown compared to SL, other than that after disabling the Citrix service, it is smooth here.