You overstate the case significantly
With 3000 points at 1000 operations/second (and if it is only doing 1000 operations/second, then you have another problem...) it will finish in 3000^2/1000=9000 seconds, or just a few hours. Your friend was doing something else wrong if it hosed his computer for a week.
Also travelling salesman is not as bad as you make it out to be. Travelling salesman takes O(n*n!) with the naive algorithm. (For n locations you can just try each possible order of visiting locations, and calculating each answer takes order n work. If you want to be smarter about it, you can stop looking at a path as soon as it takes longer than the best you have. In the real world that tends to reduce the problem complexity by quite a bit, but it doesn't help in the worst case.) So travelling salesman of 7 takes 35,280 steps. 8 takes 322,560 steps. And so on.
At the measly 1000 operations/second, you can solve it for 10 in a half-day. At a more optimistic 1,000,000 operations per second, you can solve it for 13 in about a day. It is also a highly parallelizable problem, so you can easily split the work across multiple computers working in parallel, so you can realistically do a bit more than that.
Of course if you wanted to work out, say, 20 in a year, it would take about 15,000 computers that were each doing a hundred million calculations per second to do it...
Cheers,
Ben
