Snow Leopard sluggish after upgrade from 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.
Okay upon looking at what I can see on your screen, you do have quite a fair bit of processes running.
I would recommend these steps to narrow the troubleshooting steps :
- Put the Mac into a Safe Boot mode. *(hold down the Shift key when the Mac is booting up)
- Assess the Mac while it is in Safe Boot mode, is the severe slowdown still present?
- If the slowdown is no longer as severe (test the CD eject thing, that one is interesting), then you can conclude that one of the processes starting up with the Mac is killing it.
It shouldn't be Spotlight (mds, mdsworker), it's quite streamlined, and if it is chomping away we will be able to see on the Activity Monitor.
Now, what you can do is to do a full system clean using Onyx or something. That might help. Also, removing software that has startup processes is good. I noticed your httpd daemon running too - try checking to see if you got any services such as Web Server turned on? Try turning it off to see what happens?
The problem is that there could be MANY reasons why SL is crawling on your notebook - but having used SL for closed to a month now (10a432 dev release), I would say it is most probably a 3rd-party software that is causing the slowness.
Good luck, keep us updated what's happening.
P.S It's fun to troubleshoot sometimes, but with SL's install speed being so fast, I would seriously ask you to reconsider a reformat, reinstall, and TM restore. Cheerios.
It's probably because Spotlight is indexing your files again. Wait a few hours and see if it's still sluggish.