MBP Recently Running Slow

Hello everyone,

I purchased my new MBP several months ago when it was updated and have noticed recently major slow/lagging problems. I often run various programs including Photoshop, 3d modeling programs, AutoCAD, etc. Just writing this message right now I've gotten the spinning beach ball 3 or 4 times.

I'm running 4GB of RAM, 2.6 GHz processor speed, and 200GB Hard drive

I've tried a few different things like running Disk Utility, doing the old /sbin/fsck -fy thing, resetting the PRAM, and regularly running Onyx

What other types of troubleshooting can I do? Is there a program I can use that might solve my problems?

The last thing I want to do is completely reinstall leopard...

 

So I've got a pretty big deadline tomorrow for school and all of my apps keep freezing and everytime I try to restart it it takes about 5 minutes to shut down and then another 10 minutes to start back up and everything just keeps freezing again.

I have no idea what to do...

 

Archive and reinstall or erase and reinstall?