Many categories

[Vevhuset]

I have setup a WAMPServer to test Prestashop, it has around 500 categories and 8000 products and it runs pretty ok (not much optimization done yet, just running out of the box 1.4) it is a bit slow on startup though and I assume this is because it loads all categories into the category block, I noticed that there is the AJAX Sliding Categories module as an alternative, has any one tried this and have any input on the difference in performance with many categories ? could it be worth a try ?

Any other navigation modules that works well with this number of categories (I would like to get down the time to display the first page).