Hey so yeah I upgraded my 2011 Mac Book Pro (15", 2.0ghz i7 ,4GB ram and a 5400rpm 500gb) to lion without doing a clean install. I used to time its boot up on sl and it took merely 32 seconds to load everything up. After running lion for over a month now I've been noticing a significant drop in boot time and shutdown which used to take 4 seconds. On lion , it took 50 seconds to boot and around 20'seconds to shutdown, a grey nut spins for awhile before blacking out. What might seem to be the problem? I would really like to revert my system back to the once snappy leopard. I wanted to perform a clean install but cloning the hard disk is somewhat a problem for me as I can't afford to loose all the data in my external hard drive if it's needed to be reformatted. Hope to get some answers from anyone out there ASAP as I'm having my holidays now and have loads of time at home to perform the necessary steps to make that cat run fast again thanks . Really appreciate the help from you guys thanks . Another quick add on sorry bout any of you there knows how on earth I could remove the speck satin see thru case from the top of the mbp? Thanks again 