Quote from: fatbitcoinfan on April 21, 2012, 11:01:42 AM

An online wallet would solve the problem all right but that defeats a lot of the things that made bitcoin attractive to me.

There are varyious types of online e-wallets. A couple examples of hosted E-Wallets that hold your bitcoin keys would Paytunia and InstaWallet, for example. The benefit is that you don't need to keep a backup yourself. The downside is you are extending trust to the E-Wallet operator.

There are also Javascript-based wallets, such as StrongCoin and My Wallet from Blockchain.info. Both of those do the encryption in the browser and then store only the encrypted data on the server host. This gives the benefit of an online wallet without the security risk when trusting the wallet service's operator with access to your private keys.

Quote from: fatbitcoinfan on April 21, 2012, 11:01:42 AM

It's a bit worrying for the future of bitcoin. Will the cumulative burden eventually overwhelm even hi-spec dedicated bitcoin servers?

On decent hardware the resources consumed by the Bitcoin client are fairly negligible. Your laptop is probably at the edge of the "too limited in resources to provide a smooth experience". It is probably perfectly functional as a bitcoin node, just that it doesn't allow for multitasking with your other resource-consuming functions.

One of the improvements with v0.6 was a much faster configuration setting for the database. Are you still finding it problematic?

Related:
- http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability