Macos – Insomniax on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

mds is Spotlight, indexing your data. It will take some time (though I heard it's faster in Snow Leopard than in earlier versions), but let it do its work, and once it's done, your Mac should be much faster again.

Also, .0 versions of OS X have had many problems, and 10.6.1 is likely to be available in a month (based on data) - it will likely contain several bug fixes that didn't make it to 10.6.0.

I've got a slightly newer BlackBook and that's working quite well with Snow Leopard. I'd definitely upgrade from Tiger.

That said, you'd more likely get the best performance increase from stuffing as much RAM as possible in - I'd guess that would be around 4GB on that age MacBook.

Macs don't quite seem to collect as much 'fluff' as Windows PCs do so I'm not sure if you need to go to great lengths to do a full rebuild of the machine. I'd first upgrade the RAM and then to Snow Leopard.