Desperately need help - VERY slow and unstabile system

[miles_sthlm]

Hey guys!

Ok I have a little bit of a crise since i start a new job as designer tomorrow and my MacBook Pro is very slow and unreliable.

I run os 10.5.3 and for the third time the system is so slow that I know no other way then to reinstall everything a g a i n. I really want to avoid this since its very timeconsuming and my system and all my appz are configured to suit my needs.

Everything takes much longer, starting a program, opening a new tab in firefox! and so on and so on. It freezes on a regular basis and sometimes it snaps out of it but mostly not.
It also seems to be much warmer, physically that is.

I suppose I do something wrong to cause this to reoccur as often as it does, but I cant understand what and so far is formating and reinstalling the only thing that helped.

Is there any way to track this problem instead? i tried to look at the memory usage but I as a novice couldnt find anything that seemed odd.

I would be so thankful for any kind of help

Best regards
Emil

 

[Satcomer]

How long have you had your MacBook Pro? If you have had it long maybe doing some software maintenance on it with either program Yasu or Onyx and run all the cleaning routines (rebooting the Mac TWICE after the routines run). This may help.

Plus is your MacBook Pro still under warranty?

 

[Giaguara]

What shows in the logs when it crashes?
How much RAM do you have? (1GB is easily absorbed by OS X itself, so if you have 1GB and it is slow, get more RAM)
How much empty space do you have on the hard drive? (Should be always at least 15 % of total space empty).
One more common thing that may slow your system is if you have thousands and thousands of fonts in your system... since you are doing graphics, would this perhaps be the cause for you? How many installed fonts do you have?