Why? Why do you want to give EA more money? I'm all for more mounts, social armor, and vanity pets, but I'm also all for putting them in the game. None of this, "Look at me, I have more disposable income than you!" nonsense.

I'm not sure why topics like this one keep popping up. Quite simply, direct currency conversions never tell the full story and are generally meaningless when you're comparing the price of a product in two separate markets. Consider this. In New York City, a 20 oz. bottle of Coke costs about $2.50. Where I live, it costs $1.50. Why the difference? After all, $1 = $1, right? The currency conversion says that the cost should be the same! The difference comes from 1) differences in taxes, 2) differences in the cost of living, 3) differences in competition, and 4) differences in supply and demand. The short of it is that Coca Cola determined the price that would maximize their profits for each market and that's what they sell their soda for. The authenticator is no different. You can't look up the exchange rate for GBP<-->USD and cry foul because the prices don't match up exactly. EA determined that they could maximize their profits by selling authenticators for 8 GBP and so they're selling authenticators for 8 GBP. If UK citizens weren't wiling to pay that price, then their internal calculations would have produced a lower price and they would have sold them for that price instead. Get it?

I very much enjoy using my Corsair K90 keyboard. It's priced a bit outside your budget at $129, but you might be able to get a deal somewhere!

I would not continue to play SW:TOR if it used any transaction model other than the current one. F2P games aren't free, almost always cost more than P2P games, and generally give advantages to the players who happen to have the most real-world money. **** that.

Hyper Threading is awesome. It might not matter too much for SW:TOR, but I'd imagine that the OP will use his computer for other tasks, too. Besides, SW:TOR can use four cores. If you only have four cores, then SW:TOR will use all of them and anything else running simultaneously will be competing for resources. Boo to that! You use an entire drive for the swapfile and backup? Really? Just turn off the swapfile. You really don't need it with 8GB (or 16GB) of memory. I haven't used a swapfile in at least four years, now. Anyway, the multi-disk idea is overall a good one. Normally, I'd say that SDDs are a waste of money, but HDDs are expensive right now (thanks, floods!), so SDDs are more competitive. It might not be a bad idea to get a decently-sized one (128GB) for your OS and games. Then, you could just buy a single 2TB HDD for data, etc. I did something a bit different. My motherboard supports RAID5, so I just bought three 1TB disks (this was about three years ago!) and stuck them into a RAID5 configuration. Intel Storage Matrix isn't as good as a dedicated RAID controller, but it's actually pretty awesome. My disk read times are similar to a SSD and I got more storage space for less money.

[Citation Needed] Last I checked, sub numbers were still at 1.7M.

The original patch time was later (I forget if it was 2am PST or 3am PST), but the European players didn't like it because they wanted to start playing earlier in the afternoon. So, BioWare moved the patch time back a few hours. Look, it's a world-wide game. No one time is going to work for everyone. The US gets priority because we have more players and because BioWare Austin is located here. If you would prefer locked regions like WoW has, then you can have staggered maintenance times. If that's the case, then certainly you should make BioWare aware of it. However, I don't think that they're likely to change the system any time soon. After all, players in all regions already have characters on servers that are located in other regions.

I really, really doubt that patch 1.2 will be 10GB in size.

Fine. This one was free and had nothing to do with a future expansion. http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_3.3.0 Briefly, it included a new raid with 12 bosses (10/25-man, normal/hard), three new 5-man dungeons (normal/hard), a cross-server dungeon finder tool, a new weekly fishing derby, a brand new quest tracking system (very similar to what SW:TOR has now), a revamped tutorial system for new players, many changes to every class in the game, tons of UI changes, a new legendary weapon quest, tons of new achievements (largely to go with the new raid and dungeons), and an obscene number of item changes and bug fixes. Good stuff!

Is patch 1.2 more than 10 GB, or is the download more than 10 GB because you need to download copies of every data file in the game that they've changed in 1.2 in order to keep those changes isolated from their live version counterparts?

World of Warcraft has released many free patches that are larger than 1.2.

They're refunding points because your current build would be invalid once the patch hits. This happens when they remove a talent, change the number of points that one can invest in a talent, move a talent to another location, or change a talent dependency (the arrows). If they didn't refund your points, then you would actually have a talent build that could not be rebuilt. See the problem? Anyway, you can test whatever builds you'd like on the test server. I don't see the problem.

You shouldn't have to do any of this. My computer has specs similar to the OP, except that I have a better processor (Core i7 860). Same 8GB of memory, same GTX 570, same 64-bit Windows 7 (though mine is Ultimate, that shouldn't matter here). SW:TOR runs flawlessly for me. From what I can tell, older processors and AMD processors have a much tougher time running this game than newer Core i5/i7 chips. I'd recommend upgrading to one of those, if you can. The number of cores does matter. When I run SW:TOR, it uses all four of my cores.

I don't know about 60-100fps on a 550 Ti. That doesn't sound right. Anyway, AMD's chips don't seem to handle this game very well when compared to Intel's chips. That might be part of your problem.

If you aren't willing to wait for the (highly overpriced) SW:TOR keyboard from Razer, then you might be interested in a (technically superior and certainly cheaper) K90 from Corsair.