You can get around the "hard drive/bandwidth thrashing" on the Bitcoin-QT client by downloading the block-chain manually and running Bitcoin with the -rescan and -checkblocks parameters the first time you run Bitcoin with the new block-chain files.
P.S. This is simply a faster more efficient way to do it. Not the best way if you don't want to have your own copy of the block-chain.
Topic: what is the most user-friendly desktop client? (Read 680 times)
If you want to get started quickly and not download the whole blockchain, I'd recommend MultiBit. I also find its UI very user-friendly.
I mean a client that doesn't thrash a normal user's hard disk / bandwidth when installing???
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