Does this forum have stickies ?  If so then this thread (or at least the first page of it) deserves one I think 

It's just taken me 36 hours to download the block index with the bitcoin-qt app, and that's on a dual-core Athlon 4400+ with 4Gb ram and SATA drives.  I stopped it and moved the blkindex file onto a RAM-based filesystem halfway through which helped speed quite a bit, though I didn't have enough RAM spare to put the data files in too.

I do feel that this is one aspect of bitcoins that isn't going to scale too well in the future as the block history keeps growing, and won't be compatible with mobile computing.  Personal clients and wallets may become the exception rather than the rule, as they'll exceed the capacity of mobile devices as well as the transfer limits on data plans.  As a newcomer I'd be interested to read up on any future plans or directions if anyone knows where to find them ?

Like I mentioned in another thread I've been watching bitcoins as an idea for quite a while, but was put off by the instability and security problems last year until I understood things better.  Recently decided it was time to get started so here I am !

Hi Portnoy, another newbie here keen to get some btc experience points :-)  Could you add my address 129DHa4tAM4vL2aVJuQ3zzP198N7bD7Lp5 please ?  This is newly created for this purpose so should never be "recently used" elsewhere.

I'm a newbit(*) to actually using btc but I've been watching the development of bitcoins as a currency for a year or more.  I think it's a brilliant idea and an example of something the net can really enable that can't easily be done offline.  So I'm signing up here so that I can chat to people who have them for sale and get me some decent amount of BTC of my own :-)

(*) that was a typo but i like it so left it in