'06 MacBook is slow with 10.7.3 Lion - how to increase speed?

You should max out your memory. A number of people have found poor performance with the 10.7 Lion minimum of 2GB, which was fixed by going to at least 4GB. Your system is limited to accessing 3GB, however, if you install 2x2GB you'll pick up some extra performance from having a matched pair of memory cards.

See this Apple note on replacing memory: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1651 . You can also watch a video at http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/macbook_13/

I plan on upgrading mine to lion, do you like it

Scott, Sorry to jump in here and add my two cents however I thought I would share something with you that has made a world of difference for my 2.3 dual g5. I see where there were several suggestions to Max out your Ram. Well my 2.3 is maxed out at 16gb. and I really only noticed a difference when photoshop and fcp were rendering.

What made the biggest difference for me atleast as far as speed goes was changing out the HDD(hard drive) and replacing it with a SSD(solid state drive). I purchased the Samsung 840 120gb for $79. on sale from microcenter. I use this drive to house my OS, Applications and basic user info. I use the 7200 rpm 2TB HDD for all of my video,music,pics etc....

There are many instances where you can't guarantee noticeable performance improvements, but this is one you can!

Installing the SSD has decreased my overall boot time by almost 20 seconds. All of my apps now open with 1-3 bounces max on the dock. I usually encode my music from cds as lossless and sometimes itunes would hang playing those files while I would be looking around through itunes. This no longer happens. there are more instances that I could tell you about but it would get a little wordy.

By far the best bang for my buck so far in improving my computer performance tho has been the SSD. Ram is nice but when youre booting up and launching apps its the hard drive before the ram.

Hope this helps! Best of luck to you.

Is this with Lion?