I feel your pain in so many ways. I have an over-abundance of content myself, with currently about 150gb in my main runtime and another 50gb in a secondary runtime.  I have never been so great at organizing.  I too hate coding, scripting, programming, etc... and have learned just enough of some of it here and there to get buy at some tasks. Here are things I have tried and still do to try to keep organization - though time consuming.

1. I was still using Poser 4 Pro Pack up until 2007, mainly to maintain Lightwave compatibility.  The biggest drawback is that you can not have more than 255 items in any section of your runtime or folder, and it does not recognize subfolders beyond the first set.  I easily exceed the 255 item limit, and had a lot of trouble loading content for the longest time (until I started using a third party library manager).  I would go through windows explorer and manual regroup items within the runtime - good old copy paste.  Putting as many M3 items as i could in one folder, grouping them by rough Genere (i.e. M3 SciFi Clothes, Sets - Urban, Sets - Fantasy, Aircraft, etc...).  The first time I re-organized this way took about 12 hours, and depending on how much content I installed in between could take 1 to 4 hours per update.  Very time consuming, and I occasionally ended up with duplicate CR2s when installing updates etc...  Then after I started using Advance Library Manager I got lazy and let over a year, and several hundred product installs go by - so my runtime is a mess.  I still sort of use this method, but with a twist now.

2. I read in another forum a trick that I rather liked, and adapted to fit my own method - that is to install new content to an external runtime named for the content or figure type. You would create a seperate runtime on a part of your HD easy to find (great when using USB devices for runtimes) for each figure or theme of content ( Michael 3, Victoria 3, Michael 4, Sci-Fi Sets, Fantasy Sets, etc...).  Under the recomendation these would then simply be loaded as external runtimes - but I prefer to then go into these runtimes and further streamline the installed folders to match pre-established folder groups from my method 1 above - then just merge this new runtime in, pre-organized.  This saves a lot of time in adding/organizing new content, as when editing these external runtimes, I already know what has to be moved to which folders, and don't have to hunt through my overly massive runtime for the new content.

3. In about 2005/6 ish I discovered a program called Advanced Library Manager, I like the interface about 1000 times better than any version of Posers interface. It is very customizable, though it can be a pain to set up initially (once you get the hang of it it's a snap).  On the downside, with particularly large runtimes, sometimes content seems to become "lost" or not show up in it, not sure why, but then the versions supporting Poser Pro and Poser 8 are beta only.  It is still worth the occasional problem, as it has made searching through my runtime a snap (with thumbnails on the left, and folder tree for ALL categories on the right you can just scroll down through the folders one by one and look at the thumbs until something catches your eye, or you see the content you are looking for.  Also, folders are not limited to those in Poser Runtimes, you can add pretty much any folder, great for rapid importing of other object formats.

4. I also periodicly zip my two runtimes into multi-part zips and save them off to a USB drive as an archived backup - just so I wont have to re-install and reorganize from scratch.

As for machine wise, I really cant afford anything fancy at this point (all of my spare money has gone to software, and/or content, and I still do not have everything I want).  I am doing the bulk of my work on a Celeron 2.66ghz single core that I built myself, and periodicly add new parts too - running 3.5gb of ram, and 1.5TB of HD space.  This is in a local network with other mixed machines I use mainly as render nodes, the oldest being Celeron 2.66ghz single core with 2gb ram, and the newest being Intel Core 2 Quads with 4gb of Ram (hoping soon to upgrade to 8gb).  Also on the network, and hosting one of the runtimes I use is a Celeron 833mmx with 240gb HDs and 512mb ram that was my workstation up until 2006.  I desperately need a new workstation, and have priced out parts to build one several times, but just do not have the funds at this time.  About once every 6 months I pick up a 1tb external HD for backups purposes - next time I plan on getting a 2tb.  For HDs I recomend sticking to good quality HDs, I try to stick to Western Digital, and I try to go with Black whenever possible, but have settled for blue on a few occasion with good luck.  My computers run nearly 24/7, and I check the HDs for errors about monthly.  My oldest HD is coming up on 4 years old, with nor errors, bad sectors, or data loss yet (I could not say this when I used to use Maxtors or Samsungs).  Have good cooling fans in your case, and if possible try to have a large one right near or in front of the drive bays.

Don't know if any of that will be helpful to you, but best wishes.

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