There's nothing I love more, in any MMO I've played, than to play a healer in PVP.
Then I started leveling a sage. I mirror your comments. Time to roll a shadow, I guess.
I want to spend 90% of my game time in PVP. I refuse to participate in huttball. It's so bloody tedious and awful. So I'll run into the fire or slime over and over while sending my companion on slicing missions.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Go with SSD. I went from a first gen raptor to SSD and it was very, very much worth it.
Going to windows 7 will be nice too. I could never get a Vista system to perform properly.
If it takes you ages to load it might be a hard drive bottleneck. Sometimes they get flaky like that (or seem like input lag) when they start to go bad. I would do an exhaustive check...
My wife's computer is worse than yours and she didn't have any issues during beta (doesn't play now.)
0 rpm hdds are totally worth it. I'm always waiting on everyone else to load in...
I don't know why everyone wants tons of ram for gaming, unless they are running SSD and want to reduce pagefile to a minimal size. My SWTOR image is at about 1.2gb after playing 3 hours.