Mac slowing down

Hi,

i've got a macbook pro, 2.4ghz and 2gig of RAM.
it's about 1,5 years old. But, through past months it's getting slower. I still have 35 gigabyte of free disk space, so i don't know where this slowdown comes from. (in the beginning starting up time was about 45 seconds, now it's about twice as much )
I all ready did a 'archive and install', but it's still as slow...

Do you have any idea what the problem could be?

Thanks

First up 35GB of how much? HDD need a minimum of 15% free space to work at their peak. Not much if it is a 500GB drive, just barely okay for a 200GB. Also do you do any housekeeping? If not suggest download Onyx or MainMenu and cleaning caches, running maintenance scripts etc.

10.5 or 10.6?

i made some free space on the hard disk, it's about 30% free right now and also ran some onyx maintenance scripts, the problem is still the same.
I'm running mac OSX 10.5.8

First off I would install the 10.5.8 combo update.
Mac OS X 10.5.8 Combo Update
Another thing is that a clean install has always worked for me, including reinstalling any other software from install discs, or downloading fresh for vendors.
...then just copying my pics, movies, music, documents back over.

Also, here are a couple of threads you may wanna read.
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/93819-basic-os-x-mac-troubleshooting.html
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os...87952-defragging-os-x-discussion-example.html

Overall, I'm big on the clean install of everything, as it has always brought my own Macs over the years back to the way they ran when I first got them.

How many programs are you usually running at the same time? If it's a lot, 2GB may not be enough RAM. It might be worth the money to just bite the bullet and buy more.

If startup is your main concern, you may have too many processes being launched during boot (this would be a primary reason for a slower startup). I don't mean applications that are listed as login items - that is completely different. What applications do you have installed? Some may very well need to having things started during boot.

I'm not running that many programs at the same time. But, it's all ready from boot up that my laptop is going slow. (it's not only boot up, also starting of programs, opening documents and such stuff).
Also, the hard drive is making a lot of 'search sounds'. In any case, more than some months ago.