Common reasons for lag on MacBook Pros/Leopard?

Hi all. I have a MacBook Pro that's a couple of years old. I'm running 10.5.6 on a 2.16 GHz Core 2 with 2 GB of RAM. As of late I've been noticed some very poor performance, specifically a lot of lag and sluggishness.
This manifests itself in a few ways. I notice when I'm playing music through iTunes or streaming sites that it gets very choppy. My mouse tends to lag at times and I also notice it when using Expose (the windows don't move smoothly). I've also had a couple of system crashes lately which I rarely had previous to the last couple of months.
I've searched some forums and tried some of the fixes (e.g., repairing disk permissions) but these things haven't helped. It's possible that I just need to up my hardware although when I check Activity Monitor I sometimes, but don't always, see the CPU spiked when I'm noticing problems.
Are there any steps I can take to diagnose what's going on here and potentially fix this?

Heya... Next time you are in the middle of a slow spell, definitely pop open Activity Monitor and if those CPU meters are maxed, it's because the CPU percentages of all the processes are hitting 200%. Anytime (ever) you see the meters peaking, you most definitely will be able to see who's eating it up, because the meter/graph is directly tied to the sum total of the usage of all processes. Sort it in descending order and the top apps are the prime offenders.
If you notice the CPU is mellow, check the RAM. If the pie chart doesn't have a shred of green, then you have no more free RAM and the system is now resorting to swap space. You can jump over to the disk activity meters and watch them thrash as the system is paging data from RAM to disk over and over. If you /then/ decide to try and close some husky program (aka Photoshop) that's been sitting open but unused for the past 3 hours, you're now going to wait while the system pages all that data in (while pushing something else out) before it can even just quit.
If you see all the meters totally freeze up for a few seconds, you might be having IO failures (disk drive is dying, etc.). To elaborate: if it's updating the graph every second but sometimes pauses for 5 seconds and jumps back to life.
The stuttering graphics have happened to me even on Macs with the highest specs possible. It's a pain to try and pinpoint... All the eyecandy is offloaded by the GPU so the CPU is not affected by it. It could be anything from video RAM running low to the bus getting swamped, to something causing Quartz to go wacky. I have found that simply logging out and logging back in (restarting the WindowServer) almost always fixes it. That's a lousy answer and I would love to get off my butt and find the 'what' there.
If the audio starts skipping, that can also be a number of things. Maybe the disk is overtaxed, thus your player can't read the audio data fast enough, or maybe some program is going crazy and doing things to trip up the audio pipeline. Something as simple as an app neglecting to write *one bit* of audio data can cause endless static since everything's now misaligned. It's usually software related.
If you start with the "CPU, RAM, disk activity" process of elimination, you'll generally be able to figure out what's going on. The important thing is to try and avoid trying solutions that are totally unrelated... not to mention that today it might be one thing, tomorrow the next. There is no list of things that'll work every time. =)

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