Speeding up Shiteroom. Sorry, Lightroom.

I recent went to Portugal and took about 1000 pics on my D40. Before that I took about a 500 at my brothers registry and another 1000 or so at associated wedding related events. loading everything onto my lightroom took a while. I didn't mind as It's always been worth the wait to see what damage can be done in the Lightroom developing module.

Unfortunately, like many Lightroom users I was suddenly attacked by the Lightoom "Check folders and file locations." I use a traffic analyser on my network and seeing as my images are always stored on a remote drive I was confused as to why there was no traffic, yet Lightroom had more or less frozen.

I quit, restarted, rebooted, tried switch autowrite on and off, everything mentioned in the forums. I knew it wasn't the machine (Dell XPS M1710 - dual core, 2gb mem etc etc.) or the network (I tried hardwiring to increasing speed - nothing.) Eventually I had an epiphany:

Lightroom is great at "Developing" but shite at everything else. I have no need to maintain a catalogue as you can just re-import the folder of RAW files whenever necessary. Lightroom panic when you move folders anyway. So...

I Deleted ALL folders links and collections in Lighroom. (I actually just deleted the entire catalogue file from My Docs/Lightroom (XP). It is irrelevant information that just slows the retarded software down. I'm am also going to write to Adobe to request that they stop allowing alcohol on the premises while their programmers are working. PATHETIC coding!!

Now I import photos from the local drive only. Edit them all however I want, export them, then copy the raw files and exports to my remote drives and delete the local files and remove the folder links and collections from lightroom again.

Progress at last! It's a shame to have to use the software this way but it works. My Shiteroom has had a colonic.