So.... where are the patch notes? Kind of used to seeing those shortly after shutdown. Hope you didn't forget! Heh.

As an addendum to Mubrak's reply: an alternative to ParSec would be StarParse by Ixale. It's my personal favourite.

The person above me has pretty much covered your question, but I'd certainly not buy those on the GTN, unless you manage to get them for quite a bargain. Once certain Cartel Market packs are [temporarily] removed, the prices steep up at an insane rate. On my server, these packs quickly rise up to 1.5 million credits per pack, and this isn't even a Hypercrate at all. All in all, I suggest having patience and wait until they return (hopefully in Hypercrate format).

Keeping in mind the two posts above me: should you find no significant change in performance, I would suggest upgrading your GPU. While the Radeon HD 5450 is not necessarily a very bad one, it is essentially just a cheap replacement for let's say, an integrated chipset. It's certainly not a gaming GPU. A game such as WoW, it will run fine. But certainly not other MMORPGs like AoC, Aion, and the likes. Truth be told, you're better off with a new GPU if you want to see real results. Of course that'll depend on what you consider 'playable'. On my old desktop, I managed and kept on raiding in WoW with 2-4 FPS as a healer (in The Burning Crusade), so it's all about what you consider doable. Also, check NotebookCheck or any other benchmark site if you're curious about the performance and its capacity at such. EDIT: Seems people post-jumped me. So yeah, what Dasffion said.

Ultimately one or the other is going to be the victim as timezones prove to be a pain. BioWare will have to choose a certain time, and it's either the American or European lot that will be the scapegoat for that matter. Unless they'll manage to have two different maintenance times for these respective regions of course. Also, OP: u mad? Thought so. Too bad, learn to live with it.

To my knowledge, it is only a temporary thing. Surely one can live without it for a little while.

I don't think the Mass Effect achievements were bad at all. But yes, I concur. I most certainly prefer the WoW model.

AFAIK, the search function has been disabled at the moment. I think it's either due to the preventing overloading the server with mass traffic, or because of something related to Google having cached all the beta posts. Something along those lines anyway.

Apparently it does, but not in the same fashion as that of WoW, if that's what you were basing it on. From a post (06-12-2011) on MMO-Champion which then quotes an employee named David Bass:

Hello all, Thought I'd make a nice introduction thread. Every forum I'm fan of deserves one of course. My name is Alain, a 19 year-old male who was born and lives in the Netherlands (hup Holland!). If some of you are more curious, I live in the province Noord-Brabant. My knowledge in regards to languages extends to the following: Dutch (fluent), English (fluent), German (reasonably fluent) French (reasonably fluent), Italian (currently learning), Turkish & Arabic. My interests would be: music (classical), opera, programming, physics, mathematics, philosophy, role-play, Star Wars, Star Trek, and gaming. Gaming usually in the form of realm-first competition in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, which I recently quit. Currently, I'm studying IT application development. However, once I have received my diploma, I intend to focus my study on music, mainly directed toward opera (which is singing and acting, similar to a musical in a certain manner). At this very moment, I'm a bass-baritone with "extreme" reach to high notes, making me AFAIK full baritone, and partial tenor & bass. If you don't know what it is – bass is the lowest male voice, whereas baritone is "middle" (quotation marks because baritone lies both in the bass range as well as tenor), and the tenor highest; not counting the counter-tenor. Having said that, I also love role-play. Back in 2008-2009 I used to own a role-play community for the game SW:JK3. The name was JK-RP. It was great fun and had roughly 94 members visiting daily at a certain point. However, due to complications, I was forced to shut it down after ~1.5 year. As in regards to SW:TOR, I'm on Uthar Wynn EU, a Jedi Sage (Telekinesis & Balance) named Alistair.