[James Critchley]

Nikhil,
Is there a reason why you are not using the "pcg" function which assumes symmetric positive definite inputs? This should be faster. Also please consider using the diagonal as a preconditioner. Unfortunately I do not have access the MATLAB at the moment. Could you try please the following? And sorry in advance for any bugs:

Ns = sparse(N);
D = diag(Ns);
Ds = sparse(diag(D)); #This was a bug... maybe it still is!

# Reference Solution
tic
output = Ns\d;
toc

# CG Solution
tic
output = pcg(Ns,d)
toc

# Diagonal PCG Solution
tic
output = pcg(Ns,d,[],[],Ds)
toc

# Reverse Cutthill-McKee re-ordering
tic
p = symrcm(Ns); # permutation array
Nr = Ns(p,p); # re-ordered problem
toc

# Re-ordered Solve
tic
output = Nr\d; #answer is stored in a permuted matrix indexed by 'p'
toc

Another advantage to the conjugate gradient methods is concurrent form of the solution within each iteration (parallel processing).

Best regards