Without knowing more about your pc, I would suggest something like an AMD 6850. It is as close as you can get to a current gen card for the least amount of Watts needed. You can normally find them with deals for about $130 or so. Buying a video card to use for gaming that is under 100 dollars is hardly worth it these days. All the nvidia cards under 100 are generally just re-branded geforce 8800s with some added features like hdcp and hardware video decoding for hd video playback. The actual gaming cards generally just get discontinued. The 775 slot had a huge range of cpu's so that doesn't limit it much. If you had something like the popular q6600 then you can put anything up to a about a nvidia 570gt before the cpu starts being a limiting factor. If you actually want a card that might last awhile. The geforce 560 ti or the amd 6950 would be decent choices. Both of those are going to require a decent power supply though. Generally if you got a factory built pc they probably put in the lowest that would support the shipped components. That said. It is probably a bad time to buy a video card. AMD and Nvidia are both going to a 28nm process in Q1 2012. With the high end cards out in January and the mid/low range later. If nothing else it should drop the prices on the current lineups. The high end should see a significant upgrade in performance and the mid/low end should see a good drop in power required.

In the lvl 30 missions you pretty much need the upgrade that lets you boost laser dps by sacrificing shield regen and vice versa. This adds a little more to it. Although basically you press 1 when firing and 2 when not firing. So it isn't a huge thing. Though it does make it require 2 hands at least.

What is with all the dungeon finder hate? There is nothing inherently evil or community destroying about it. People don't just use the tool and then all of a sudden become evil. Here is a hint, they already were inconsiderate and selfish people to begin with. It should be on the community to foster a positive experience, not for a game to be designed to force it. Be friendly and considerate in the group and hope it rubs off. If not, add the player to an ignore list and move on. Don't blame a perfectly good tool for the communities issues. I don't remember people arguing to remove the bazaar after it was added in EQ because of the loss of "community" in trying to sell your good in the commanlands tunnel by spamming ooc chat. Although I've read enough forum posts over the years to know that someone was probably trying to make that very argument.

To some people their character is an extension of themselves. There is nothing wrong with making a multitude of characters, but that shouldn't be the end all solution to playing different styles. Just as I personally feel like filling different roles, why can't my character feel the same way? One of the biggest improvements in MMOs over the years was the bring the player not the class mindset. It is a sad day when skill and difficulty is defined by inconvenience and tediousness. Personally I think I would rather get away from the talent tree model all together and go back to the old eq model of AA's instead. I understand the reasoning behind talent trees to bring diversity inside the class, but in all the games I have played there has always been a cookie cutter build that 90% of people go anyhow.

This is probably a decent ways off yet. Tablets almost exclusively use ARM processors. Games like ToR are compiled for x86 cpus. The graphics processor in the tablets also isn't up to the challenge yet, but they are gaining ground at a fast pace. Probably not at the next round of 28nm chips but the generation after them could catch up to the minimum requirement for SWTOR. Even then the problem is that x86 are generally not power-efficient enough so you would have to hope that the developer released the game also compiled for ARM. If windows 8 really does make it to tablets this might be possible. Now you could game on a Tablet PC. Those are generally just laptops with touchscreens that could fold over. They are usually expensive and heavy and run windows 7. Personally i would like to see an app that would let me do crew skills from my tablet.

Unless I just haven't figured out how to yet. This game needs chat channels. Mouseover casting would be much appreciated.

You can't use rage as an example. That game used a texture streaming technology that basically lowered settings in real time to keep the game at a smooth 60fps. The 9600gt is a dated card at this point. It was basically just a renamed 8600gts, which is almost a 5 year old card. As for your laptop, you might want to hook it up to an hdtv if possible and see if that helps your fps. If it does, that means it is probably an issue with Optimus trying to use the onboard video instead of the 555m. Sadly, unless you got the version that is in the high end MSI model, the clock speed was reduced and it is using the far slower ddr3 instead of ddr5 like most newer graphics cards. Honestly it was an odd choice for them to put 3gb of DDR3 in instead of 1.5gb of faster ddr5 when you really only use the larger amounts when dealing with resolutions over 1920x1080 or possibly 3d modeling work.

Honestly though it is a video game. What is essential? If their stated goal is to provide an enjoyable experience in which to profit from, than anything that detracts from that goal could be described as essential. By your definition you'd be happy sitting in a chat room playing a text based MUD as the graphics, voice actors, maps and sounds aren't really essential to an online interactive community. The fact that there are already ways to set modifier keys to direct spells to self or a focus target means the code is already half way there. On the list of requests by the community this has to have a crazy high ratio between demand and actual man power required to implement.

I know my smuggler is staying dps until mouseover healing is added. I've been healing in MMO's for over a decade now. Most of those years were before games started having mouseover casting. I'm to the point where I'm just tired of playing wack-a-mole. In the later years of WoW and then in Rift I felt like I could actually contribute more than just healing to a group. My shaman could watch for interrupts, my druid could cc, and my Chloromancer could dps her heart out. All of this while seamlessly healing. Hopefully the game isn't filled with people like me for sake of being able to find a decent healer, but all the great healers I knew in WoW and Rift swore by mouseovers so I'm not holding my breathe. That said, I'm sure the game is manageable without it. If I'm going to be doing a mindless task though it might as well be something that helps me solo easier. There was plenty of discussion on this all through beta, and to be honest I'm surprised (and a little bit saddened) that it didn't make it in for launch. It is one of those staples these days. It is hard to set the bar if you stumble over some of the lower hurdles.

Rift had 2million accounts by the end of the first month. I'm not positive how many were there for the release, but it was far larger then who are playing SWTOR right now. The people saying that it had 9 hour queues are cherry-picking that number. The vast majority of the servers had little to no queues. The problem was everyone picked the very first servers to roll on. And refused to reroll, even if they could regain the levels they already had in the time they would have saved from not waiting in a queue. People want to be on the most populated server though. I'll look for some hard numbers, but I'm fairly certain i remember reading them say something in the range of 750,000 users when they opened up their last bunch of servers on release night. Also, the website might say the release is the 20th, but anyone who has ever played a MMO before knows that the release starts the day the first character that isn't getting wiped is created. That was this morning. Say what you will about Rift, but it is currently the most steady MMO out there. WoW is shedding Accounts in the millions right now. They officially said they lost 2 million in the last 2 years. I can only imagine what their real day to day numbers are doing.