No more "Mac" feel after Lion

Hey guys, I have an MBP 13" early 2011 I guess I bought it june 2011.
I upgraded to Lion quite a while back, since then my laptop is getting slower day by day which I experienced from day one of Lion upgrade from SL. SL life was easy, and fast. I was a new switcher and understood the point of a Mac.

After about a year of usage with about 8-9 months on Lion, I am getting no better feeling that a Windows laptop.
Rather, my windows 7 desktop is faster. I get the Spinning Ball VERY VERY often. Everytime I open or close some reasonably resource requring app I see it..say firefox, say iphoto. iPhoto is an ensuite app, and getting the spinning wheel during that amazes me!

Apps also crash or not crash exactly the laptop hangs! The ball rotates indefinitely at times and I have to force restart or something.

Please advise what to do.

Thanks
Nikunj

Did you do a clean install when you upgrade from SL to Lion?
Do you do maintenance like,
verify/repair disk permissions,
verify/repair disk,
run onyx,
run clamx
???
Like any other machines it should need some maintenance.

Agreed. Clean installs are the best approach. Additionally, you might also consider upgrading your RAM. I normally order bare bones from Apple, then upgrade RAM and/or
drives from OWC (at lower cost). If possible, always max out your ram. Software engineers,
particularly Apple software engineers, code to maximize the hardware available to them. This, of course, is the latest and greatest. We are not so lucky and are left to try to keep up. The cheapest and easiest upgrade is RAM. Good luck.

As others advise upgrading was not the best route. You can downed Lion again by going into the App Store, holding Option button and hitting purchases and double clicking on Lion. Then burn a copy to a USB thumb drive, boot from the drive, format the hard drive and do a clean install.

Use Migration Assistant to copy everything over from your Time Machine or external hard drive. You do of course have a back up?

Also as suggested put more memory in. It will handle up to 16GB and suggest 8GB as a minimum.

Hi! Thanks for the prompt responses.
Firstly, upgrading RAM isn't an option I would consider as 4 gb ram is more than enough to run firefox/iphone/preview. Also, I can be sure about it since SL used to run them smoother than silk! lol

Upgrading isn't a good option, I read that quite a few times when I googled for issues. Okay, I think my best bet then would be none other than clean install.
I have a bootable Lion DVD already with me I made it when I first downloaded lion. Now I have heard there's something called Lion recovery partition. I suppose the clean install can be made from there too right?

Anyway, I will think about installing later but first please please give me detailed steps to keep my dada/programs/settings intact, so that when I am on a fresh install I could go back the way I was(apart from the sluggishness ofc). I can get an external but I have Time Machine disabled neither do I know how to use it. Some steps would be helpful.
Are the Migration Assistant and Time Mach. mutually exclusive?

Lion creates recovery partition on it's own. Click here. This should answer most of your question.

Please for the LOVE OF THE UNIVERSE use TimeMachine. This is very very easy to use and very very important. Google it and you find hundreds of subjects about time machine in mac.