In splitting the topic, I'm afraid we've lost the original question...
With all my movies having Actors metadata off IMDB (meaning the entire cast for every movie), and with an "Actors" section in my "Panes and Detail" view, every time I select all movies (or a big chunk of them) to perform some action, everything freezes for a noticeable amount of time, until MC is responsive again. We're talking some 3-400 movies currently. I'm curious if it's just me, or if this is a sign that we overdid it here importing stuff like crazy. Not having an "Actors" section resolved the problem.
In the absence of any other explanation, we established the problem some of us are having
might be due to a lack of memory.
Unfortunately, my machine is maxed-out at 512 Gb. It's probably not "worth my time" to be using it at all. But part of the fun is keeping it going. I also figure it's my duty to let others know MC still runs reasonably well on such a tired old machine. I think it says a lot about the quality of the software.
My tentative plan is to hold out until I can replace it with one with pre-installed with W7. I'll likely put 8 Gb in that—just so I can sleep at night. Or should it be 16 Gb, so I can play HD movies from memory?