MBA 2008 Model - Mac OS X 10.6.8 is sluggish and I want to revert back to factory settings (OS) but don't want to loose my Office for mac 2008, how?

Question

I just got a used Macbook Air (The original 2008 model) for writing purposes only. It came with Mac OS X 10.6.8 installed + Office for Mac 2008. However it's very slow and I have tried tools (like TinkerTool and Onyx) to speed it up and turn off the 'eye candy' but it still goes sluggish after around 20-25 minutes of usage. I have tried turning off 'indexing' by 'spotlight' and usual tricks I could find online but nothing worked for me.

I think it's best if I revert back to the original OS version this shipped with (OS X 10.5?). Here are my questions:

1. How would I revert back to the original OS? (I don't have any installation disks and I think before giving it to me the original owner wiped the hard disk clean and just installed the Office for mac 2008)

2. How would I make sure I don't loose my 'Office for Mac 2008'? Do I need to write down the key from somewhere?

Please help me out, I'm a Linux guy (and geek at that) but very new to Mac OS (This is my first Mac)

Answer 1

Snow Leopard is known to be better optimized than Leopard so I'm not sure it would be that great. The main bottleneck in the original Air is the slow as hell hard drive if yours doesn't have an SSD.

Regardless, you should backup your apps and data to an external drive (USB 2.0) and then reinstall the original OS (which if I remember well came in a thumb USB drive with the Air) and then restore your data and apps from the external drive.