Need Help. Macbook Pro slow startup and run

Hey guys, i need your help. I have a Macbook Pro 4,1 bought in August 2008 that is now running really slow. It takes about 10-15 minutes to start up and regular tasks such as opening folders and typing take 1-2 minutes to complete. I reset PRam and SMC but it is still slow. I verified smart status of my HD and it checks out fine. I tried to use OnyX to verify and correct permissions but it froze verifying my startup disk. Do you guys have any suggestions? I also should note that I only have 10 Gb of freespace on my HD out of 120 Gb.

It's possible that since your hard drive is pretty full...that could be causing some issues.

- Nick

Nick, I was wondering if that could be the problem, hence forth i made note of my freespace, but i don't think it is because i've been operating with 5-15 Gb free for about 1.5 years. (basically most of the time that i had the computer). Basic functions such as opening safari take a really long time (2-3 minutes), which has never happen in the past.

If I were you, I'd be backing up onto an external HD straight away, erasing your HD, and reinstalling.
I would reinstall the OS and only move back what you need to keep at least 15GB free space (which you should always have at min).
Then, I would go get a larger HD.

I erased some stuff so now i have 21 Gb free. Do you have any recommendations for backup programs?

Time machine for one, which is part of your OS, and SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.
Just remember, the less free space you have on your HD, the more time read write takes, as well as less space for virtual memory.
OS X likes plenty of free space, and when working on a near full HD, other than data corruption, you can be looking at the HD failing.
For less than $100 you can get yourself a fast 500GB HD.

Like "6string" recommended...backing everything up...then erasing/reformatting the hard drive, and finally installing a fresh copy of the OS would definitely tell you whether the slowness is "full/almost full" hard drive related.

A less involved option to try first could be deleting a bunch of unneeded stuff...get your hard drive to like 50% full...and see that helps.

- Nick

Thanks for all the help guys. So i backed up my HD, wiped my HD, and installed a fresh new copy of Leopard. It did make faster but not as fast as it should be (or at least I think). I takes my computer about 4 minutes to boot to the login screen and about 4 minutes to login. It took about 2 minutes just to open up this safari browser that i'm using right now. bare in mind that this is a fresh install of leopard, i have not added anything to it besides the updates.

I'm, thinking that it's the HD at this point. My computer used to boot in <20 seconds most of the time. I'm thinking that I might run an xbench test to see the HD read and write speed. Anyone have some stats that I can compare it too? I have a hitachi travel star HTS722020K9SA00 it spins at 7200 rpm.