My new to me Macbook Pro is frozen

Question

This is kind of a long winded story, but I want to make sure I don't miss a beat.
I recently purchased a Macbook Pro 13 inch with 2.4 Ghz Dual Core with 8 Gigs of ram.  It is used and is just under two years old.  It was purchased with a freshly scrubbed hardrive and Snow Leopard installed on it.  It worked AMAZING for the first day.  Being a PC guy forever and ever, this is my first Mac experience, to which (as you can imagine) was just incredible.
As I was checking out my new Macbook Pro, and I found the "Check for updates" - to which I found there were 5 updates available.  It installed them and restarted the computer.  After this, the Macbook slowed WAY down.  It felt like it was operating at 30% of it's original potential.  I hadn't installed any other software or done anything at all, with the exception of checked my e-mail and look at a few of the applications.  I did some research on these forums, as well as a few other locations on the web.  I tried some of the tricks people reccomend like "repairing the permissions", restarting the computer, amongst other things and none of them seemed to help.  I checked again and there were 3 more updates (for Safari, and I can't recall the other two).  Restarted after the updates still no help.  None of these problems started happening until the initial update to 10.6.8 was performed!
After further reading, apparently people who updated to 10.6.8 have had a lot of other similar issues and either said that they downgraded back to an earlier version OR they upgraded to Lion.  I then decided to bite the bullet, pay $30 in the appstore and update to Lion.  I downloaded the app and the installation began.  It has now been about 4 hours, with the installation still not complete.  It will stay at 45 minutes for a long long time, then it will start counting down as it's installing, then freeze at 5 minutes, THEN it starts the installation clock over again to 32 minutes and is counting down again.  I am not sure should I try to turn it off and turn it back on?  Let it keep going?  Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You should never upgrade a misconfigured system. That will usually make things worse, not better.
I suggest you start over. I'm assuming you backed up your data before starting the Lion installation. Boot from your Snow Leopard disc and repartition the internal drive with the default options. Then reinstall SL. You'll reboot into the Setup Assistant. Import your data from the last backup. Then run Software Update again. Test. Only when you have a properly functioning 10.6.8 installation should you install Lion.