Yesterday, I opened Bitcoin-qt.exe with the -loadblock= option. i can see the block chain has gone up by a few hundred megabytes. Today, it is still loading. it is no where near done. I estimate it will be finished by the Wednesday after tomorrow but not before. Is this normal? 
With hardware that performs poorly (CPU and storage) those numbers aren't unheard of but slower than it should be it seems.
You aren't by chance using an encrypted filesystem, are you? Or have Dropbox trying to backup the blockchain at the same time as it is being created?
Neither of those are good for bitcoin blockchain files.
An upcoming release of the Bitcoin.org client will do a much better job at this but it is not even to the testing phase yet so tht shouldn't be something you want to wait on.