LR3 great program, runs on modest kit - fabulous !

Question

I'm aware that this is a 'Help' forum and by definition is visited and posted to by people reporting and helping to solve problems. I for one wouldn't thank you for a forum full of pointless posts just voicing opinion - good or bad.
However, as someone who reads far more than he posts (someone more knowledgable always seems to be there faster to answer !!) I'm sometimes struck by the fact that the overall tone to a visitor is negative. When something as exceptional as LR in general, and LR 3 in particular, is produced surely it wouldn't hurt to have the odd 'pointless' post praising the team.
I'm using LR on a modest PC several years old (XP Pro, Core2 Duo 1.8Ghz, 3.5g GB RAM, NVidea Quadro NUS 55, twin disk with one a SATA, twin Eizo 19' monitors)) with a catalog of about 20,000 images mainly RAW files from assorted Canon kit. It installed first time, it runs just fine and I've got no real performance issues. Sometimes there's a bit of lag when doing a lot of 'stuff' to one image and I've been experimenting with the order of brush strokes and spot fixing but I came back from a shoot at sea last week, installed LR3 and culled, sorted, tweaked, fiddled, exported with no problems at all.
I've been using a Canon G10 a lot lately - nice but noisy. The new noise reduction - awesome. The Lens correction - stunnning.
My only issue so far is that with the second monitor active, performance for sharpening and NR drop off a cliff - but it's not the end of the world to turn it off while I'm doing that, and there are avenues to explore for an improvement.
I work in the software business and over the last 30 years I must have used thousands of pieces of software. Seldom have I come across a program so beautifully designed and put together. I'm constantly squealing with delight at another little design nugget that is just a joy to behold. It's capabilities are tremendous and improving with every release.
Is it perfect ? No it's not, but in the software world there is no such beast. If you are reading this as someone new to LR or wondering about LR3 -  from where I'm standing there is no question that LR is worth every penny.
Melissa - I notice you've been lurking here a bit lately. If you read this please note that speaking for myself, and probably a whole host of problem free others, we are in the teams debt for producing a product that makes the PC side of photography so pleasurable.
OK - That's enough - back to the problems. . . . .
Pete

Answer 1

I think that while Adobe are in the process of trying to isolate why LR3 appears to be having speed problems on some systems, it may be worth some of us reporting about lack of problems as well. In this vein, I'm posting to report that I also seem to be getting good performance on a somewhat ageing system (Win XP Pro SP3, Pentium D 3.2GHz, only 2 GB RAM, NVidia GeForce 6800 graphics runniing single 22" monitor, single 500GB 7200rpm HDD).
Database info: Due to the way I organise my work, my LR3 catalogs (upgraded from LR2.7) typically reference 7-8000 photos, and the photos are referenced at their original locations rather than fully imported into the LR3 database. Also, within each catalog I typically have photos organised into subfolders, each of which is something like the old "Shoots", e.g. one day's photography with less than 300 photos (my field is landscape/nature/wildlife which doesn't have the frame rate of other fields).
With all of the above, I would estimate that I am actually seeing a modest overall speed improvement from v.2.7 to v3.0. Don't seem to be having the problems, particularly with the Spot tool, that some other users are having, and haven't had a system hang yet. From the recent forums I get the impression there may in some cases be issues with running LR3 on Win 7/64 bit, and maybe on some of the newer Mac systems. I'm interested in this as a major hardware upgrade may not be too far off for me, and it will probably be to Win 7/64.
But perhaps some of the database size / database organisation issues are also having an impact with some users? I think it's particularly important not to suddenly hit LR with many thousands of photos in a single folder to try and render all at once, particularly if they're coming off a FF camera - try and organise your work into subfolders first may help. Also, I wonder if LR may perhaps run quicker if you reference photos at original locations rather than bloating the database with full imports?
In the interests of problem solving..........
Cheers,
David