Macbook Pro acting up - any suggestions?

[mach]

Hey all, I have a Santa Rosa 2.4GHz 15" Macbook Pro with 10.5.2 installed, and over the past few days it's been acting a bit erratically--

- Music in iTunes skips and stutters every now and then
- Programs in general act a bit more sluggish (Firefox, Illustrator, Photoshop)
- Intensive programs open much slower than before (mainly Illustrator and InDesign)

The only things I've done to my computer recently are uninstall Norton Antivirus (I just graduated from college and it was a school requirement to have Norton installed; I got rid of it because all it did was slow down my system) and I recently downloaded and began using Firefox 3 RC1.

Here are my specs:

15" Macbook Pro
2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo (Santa Rosa)
OS X 10.5.2
4 GB RAM (Bought from Crucial and installed myself)


Any thoughts or suggestions? Should I do an Archive and Install / Erase and Install and then restore from my Time Machine Backup? Thanks in advance for any help guys!

 

[MadDog31]

Any solutions on this? I am experiencing the same things w/ the same programs. I seem to be getting a lot of beach balls. I have run Onyx, etc.

Plus I have folders that show up from within these programs, but when I click through folders on my desktop, I can't find them and can only access them through Spotlight and Finder... :-\

 

[lewisekrantz]

Sluggishness

1. Do you have a program that monitors the processor % cpu usage installed that you can watch ?

2. Look at the activity monitor (in the utilities folder) as it will show
exactly what processes are consuming CPU time

Good Luck

 

[Sky Blue]

Erase/Install

 

[anirban]

Erase/Install

Always works, but lets not go that far just yet


Have you tried repairing permissions, reset your PRAM? Also repair the disk if it needs to be repaired.

What is Activity monitor suggesting as for CPU usage?