For the past few days I've been synchronizing my mist wallet with the blockchain (using geth). My laptop has been working all day and all night. I've already synced more than 880000 blocks. How many more blocks do I need to download?
You can take a look at the Ethereum Network Status page found here: https://ethstats.net/ to see which block the network is at. Currently, the best block is #998,717.