So I will either wait for a few more nights to get this up and running or try the wallet.dat tip and see if that will work.
Which wallet do you guys suggest as being the safest and cost effective solution? I plan on investing a small chunk of my income into bitcoin so I hope to accumulate quite a few of them in the long run
since you have SSD hard drive i think it is your internet speed that makes it slow. although keep in mind that sync is slow no matter your maximum speed.
if i am not mistaken, you can also download the blockchain separately from a torrent file that is officually being released and replace it with what you currently have and sync for a smaller time afterwards.
just make sure to download it from a trusted place. (it is called bootstrap.dat)