Terrible performance when using lightroom

Question

I have recently downloaded Photoshop CC, Bridge and Lightroom 5.2 64 bit and am suffering with terrible performance issues.  Initially both photoshop and lightroom worked really well but after only a couple of days and only a few hundred images being imported into lightroom I can no longer use lightroom. 
The computer works fine prior to me opening lightroom, I can use all programs, open files and folders with no issue.  However as soon as I have opened Lightroom then the whole system grinds to a hault.  Lightroom is unresponsive and the rest of the system practically freezes, it took over an hour to open a folder containing roughly 100 JPEGs.  When closing the laptop I have to manually close background programs because they are also unresponsive.
The computer has 6Gb RAM, 500GB HDD and a dual core processor so there is ample power to cope with this program on my system.
Could you please reccomend a resolution to these performance issuse.

Answer 1

The Adobe website has a bunch of recommendations for improving performance. Make sure you have your cache sizes right, enough free space on your drive, make sure you have the catalog and related files on the same and fastest disk. Check your preferences to make sure you're rendering appropriately sized previews. If LR is trying to generate previews that you  might not have, start Lightroom before you go to bed, let it do its thing (or force it to recreate the previews), and see how it looks in the morning. That's probably at least a good starting point. You should also be able to use your task manager or equivalent to confirm that it's Lightroom.