Upgrade my pc or not?

[Budvarholsten]

Hi guys,

I'm sick to death of lightroom generally running very slowly with raw files from my panasonic g1. If it's not crashing it's just running with very slow fps's when using the adjustment brush, grad filters etc.
Now I know that g1 files are not quite sorted in lighroom yet, but it was pretty much the same story using my g9 canon in all the versions up to the current 2.2 version.
Here's my computer specs:

Windows xp pro sp3 32 bit version.
Asus p5n 32 sli se deluxe motherboard.
Intel x6800 core 2 extreme processor.
4 gigs ram (I know only three can be used with xp)
2 bfg geforce 8800 gtx oc graphics cards running in sli mode
Asus xonar d2x sound card.
1 x 80gb hard drive + 1 x 300gb hard drive.

I'm thinking of upgrading to:

Vista 64 bit home premium
Asus p6t deluxe or Asus rampage ll extreme or intel dx 58 so motherboards.
Intel i7 extreme edition 965 3.20 ghz or Intel i7 940 2.93 ghz processor.
6 gigs of ram ddr 3 2000 mhz versions (not sure which make)
1 or even 2 nvidia geforce gtx 295's
Perhaps a small (16 or 32 gb) solid state hard drive for the operating system.
Keep the sound card.
Keep the 300 gb hard drive and add a 1.5 tb hard drive.

So here's my questions:

1: Will I notice a huge difference between the extreme processor or the regular i7? The extreme is nearly twice the price so is it worthwhile bearing in mind I am not into overclocking?
2: Which is the best motherboard out of these three, or is there any other's you can reccomend?
3: Would I benefit from using two graphics cards in sli for lightroom or is it the processor and ram that is used more in lr2 ?
4: Would I benefit from using a solid state drive for the os and installing lr on the same drive while having my pictures stored on the 1.5 tb drive?
5: Is it even worth upgrading yet? My pc was a pretty powerful lump 2 years ago when I built it, I have used norton ghost to go back to my 'day 1' settings but lightroom still runs pretty laggy.
6: Does lightroom even work with vista 64 bit?
As well as wanting it to run lightroom smoothly, I also like to play the latest games,
In fact, If I'm not doing one I'm doing the other. So will I see the huge leaps in performance that I hope to, or would it just be a waste of money? It always seems that as soon as you buy anything thing to do with computers, it is out of date a week later.
Thanks for any help and advice you can give.

[mcbit]

Have you had a look at this?

Since optimising the catalogue and increasing the cache size I have no performance issues in LR2.

I'm running an AMD64 x2 6400+ 2GB ram.

[Budvarholsten]

There seems to be some worthwhile stuff to try there, I'll give it a go.
Thanks.

[mcbit]

Let us know if it works for you.

[Budvarholsten]

I've done a few of the things suggested on that link you gave me. One thing I did notice was that my cache was set to only 2.5 gb. The site suggested upping that from 20gb to 40 gb, so I was way off even the lowest setting. I'm not sure why it was set so low, but I have a feeling that this is perhaps what may have been causing all the problems. I'll defrag as soon as I get the chance tonight.
Hopefully these things will sort it out.
Thanks again for the link, I'll report back when I've had a chance to play with it for a while.

[mcbit]

When I changed my cache it was set to 1GB!