noob font question

hello, I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to macs, I use linotype font explorer to manage my fonts, but when I turn on my comp it usally takes a while for it to load up and check my fonts, and same thing when opening up illustrator cs3, its pretty annoying, but I wanted to know if this was normal on a mac, because at work I have the same fonts, if not more and there is no lag there( that computer is a pc and weird thing is that pc 3.ghz hypertherad (like a 2yr old comp)with 1gb of ram(my mac is a mbp 2.4ghz with 4gb ram ,it should own the pc in speed) sorry if I'm saying any of this wrong

Any idea how to fix this
or can anyone tell me their mbp setup, like how many font u have, if u use a font manager and howuch ram u use

thanks, i think im going to try font book, hopefully i have better luck