King, this what I run MC on with no loss of performance:
Microsoft Windows 2000 5.0 Service Pack 4 (Build 2195)
AMD Athlon 1658 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 523 MB, Free - 204 MB
thethunder: I guess I'm not quite sure what you mean. You don't have to manually search thru your whole library to find something. If you're looking for track x, then all you have to do is type in track x in the Search box at the upper right of the screen, MC will find it for you. You can also create just about any kind of seach you want using the Smartlists, (for genre, year, rating, etc.).
When you open the Tree in the left hand column, under Artists/Album, your library is sorted by Artists (in alphabetical order), when you click on the artists, MC opens the list of songs/albums for that artist. You can then click on the album to see the individual tracks for that album or click on "All" to see all the tracks by that artist. How much simpler does it need to be?
Are you maybe not seeing the Left hand column, otherwise known as the tree? If you're looking at the "Standard" view you should see 2 columns under the player controls, the left column (the narrow one) will have directories like Audio, Video, Images, Playlists, Drivees and Devices and Plugins & Services. The wider right hand column will show the tracks depending on what has been selected.
MC also has the ability to be completely customized to sort things just the way you want.
If your media has not been tagged with some consistency or standardization, that can make things more complicated, but MC has one of the best taggers, which will allow you to fix that.
What kind of media do you have? Is it all ripped from CDs? or downloaded? How many tracks?