No you don't because you cant take your companion into warzones. I do most of my leveling through quests and have been doing most of my PVPing against enemy players that I meet doing quests and exploring the map. I have my companion with me while PVPing, as do most of the other players I meet.

Unless my companion has up-to-date gear, he takes damage much quicker than I can heal. Then he dies. Then I die. Actually, yes, I do use my companion in PVP while levelling.

I agree with this. Need/Greed developed in other games, most of which did not have companions that could use the loot from encounters. Companions are an important part of helping your character survive and succeed. My companion tanks for me and does a lot better job of it when he has good gear. Perhaps for some companions gear is less important? Having a "Need for Companion" button would remove the tension around this. I have seen people raise the issue of how companions should not get gear because they didn't participate in the group -- if a companion IS part of the party doing the flashpoint/mission, is it ok to roll "need" for gear he could use?

I would really like for Recuperate not to break stealth (or have a slower stealthy recuperate that doesn't involve blaster-shooting animation) but having it break stealth would be the next best thing.

After dying 6 times, I eventually used the "bring a friend" plan, which worked very well. However, in my penultimate battle, I came close to victory by

I (Republic) started running into enemies (Imperials) in my 20s on Tatooine and Alderaan. I saw a few on Nar Shaddaa before that, but usually around the Promenade where their bind point is close to ours. On both planets, you would get a few wandering attackers near our bases and questing areas. However, you could find a lot more if you went looking for their bases and questing areas. There was at least one quest line on Tatooine (could have been the bonus series) that actually took me into an area where Imperials were questing. Most of my random encounters have been with single opponents around my level. Sometimes it turned out well for me, other times the battle went the other way. Incidentally, there seems to be a bug where some enemy bind points show up on our maps -- look closely at the guards in the area before rushing up to bind.

I have left the "set focus" as Alt-F and set the hotkey to be my middle mouse button. I will target my companion normally and press Alt-F which sets him up as my focus target. After that, regardless of what I have targeted, when I hold down my middle mouse button and press my heal spell hotkey, my companion gets healed. However, my main target doesn't change -- so if my next action is a damage ability, it will do damage to whatever I am attacking. If I don't press the middle mouse button, and I am targeting an enemy, I will get healed rather than my companion. However, it doesn't always work very well.

I got a very good performance boost on my laptop by setting the game's priority to High (in the windows Task Manager - it defaulted to Normal) and by adding a USB memory stick and using Ready Boost. EDIT: unfortunately, the game doesn't remember that it should be high priority and will default to normal the next time you run it. Does anyone know how to set it permanently?