"Hard" is a very relative definition. I played a warrior for years in WoW, and am an avid gamer, so the SW/JK are like coming home to a comfy blanket to me. To someone who has never played an MMO, never played a class with this type of resource mechanic or abilities, it might very well seem difficult.

As it stands, this is what we get right now. It is known that BioWare is working on certain options like Anti-Aliasing which should be enabled in the near future, and it's possible that we'll get "ultra" settings in the future, but for now, this is what it is.

Check this post: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3396

Typically, a planet has quests for a certain level of player - this is shown when you look at the planet in the galaxy view on your space ship. The equipment you can buy from vendors will probably be on the lower end of the scale of those levels, and you'll have to hunt down where a vendor for your armor type is. You can use a website like TorHead to track down which vendors sell what on a planet, if you like. The vendors at the fleet will muddy the mix, as they will likely have stuff for a wide level range. Finally, it should be noted that it is most likely that you will not find the best gear by buying from a vendor. In mmos you are most likely to get the best gear as drops from instances, mobs, quest rewards, and sometimes through crafting. This is typically opposite of single player MMOs where you will hunt for that one vendor who sells the best stuff, or craft yourself the best stuff.

He's not in your inventory. Open you abilities window (default "p" key) and select the general tab, he'll be there. The same goes for mounts.

Every tier is unlocked by using 5 points. You don't have to spend 5 points in each tier to unlock the next - theoretically if you could spend 20 points in the first tier you'd be able to spend the next point in the 5th tier. If you'd like to plan, use the skill planner available at http://www.torhead.com/ to truly figure out what you can do.

At this point you can't import them, and it appears they are all stored server side. You'll have to set them up manually.

No, the green stims do not persist through death.

Artface made me chuckle... yes, the artifice skill can craft them as well.

There's a discussion on Twi'lek and their hoods here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=50092 Sounds like you just can't have a hood up as a Twi'lek.

You can buy them off the GTN or you can extract them from moddable drops.

Also, just to clarify this - the M17x cannot "hold" a GTX 560M, it indicates their current production units are produced with that chip built into the system. There is a difference, in that if you have an older M17x, you cannot just swap out the video card for an upgrade like you could with a desktop.

There is a difference between minimum and recommended specs, and while I'm sure you meet minimum, I don't believe you meet recommended specs.

"Don't see nothing" - I see everything!!! Take a look at this thread, it has information regarding the black screen after pressing play: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3396

Used? On sale? There's no way you bought a new M17x 2 weeks ago with a geForce 9400 in it.

Unfortunately the system you're running on just isn't going to run SWTOR very well. The mobile 3400 series of video cards is a few generations back now, in terms of hardware, and it was never very powerful to begin with.

Your experience will be fine playing SWTOR on a system with those specifications. Just make sure that Optimus is actually turning on your nVidia card for SWTOR - during beta I had to manually force my laptop to recognize SWTOR as a 3d game. I haven't played on my laptop since launch, so I don't know if this is still an issue, but something to keep in mind.

I don't know whether SWTOR will support a gamepad at all. You can open up the key bindings screen by hitting escape, selecting preferences, then clicking the "Key Bindings" tab at the bottom of the preferences screen. Then try to bind a movement option to a joystick direction and see what happens. Even if you manage to get it setup, you may find yourself very short on buttons to press. If you're enjoying SWTOR, and are an avid console gamer, I'd suggest sticking with the keyboard and mouse for a while. I think you'll become accustomed to it very quickly, and it really will work out better in the end for you, as the game is designed to be played with these controls.

Games like SWTOR typically have to integrate this functionality directly into the game, as any external applet that reads the information out of the game and feeds it to your LCD display would technically be violating the TOS and/or EULA.

Yeah, this information would have been useful to start with. Unfortunately you're kind of stuck with what you've got in terms of video card, and without a new one I'm not sure it's worth putting any money into upgrading to an SSD or adding more RAM, as the video card is clearly the weakest link in your setup. In that case, if you really can't live with the performance of your current system, I'd say you might want to live with your current setup while you put aside some money to get a new gaming rig.

You might want to take a look at the information posted under "Technical" in this thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=294

TorHead is currently relying on a technique termed "data mining" for its information. This means they look at the game files you can download to get information about items. Unfortunately the side effect of this is that you get items listed in the database which are not available to players. As you can see when you look at the item in TorHead, it is not listed as "for sale" by anyone. If you browse through other items, you will find they list what drops them or who sells them. Using this information, I'd say that it is unlikely that these are available in-game at this point in time, they are simply in the game files for potential future availability.

In a lore sense, the same. But I suspect that you're asking about explorable area, in which case the answer is probably an "it depends" although in general I think the impression is that the current available area on the planets is smaller than it was in SWG. I have no "proof" for this so it's just a guess.

Here's a verbose description of the function of a guild: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_(computer_gaming) In terms of joining one, you'll need to either create your own, or get invited to someone elses. If you're new to mmos, you probably want to start with joining one, in which case you can either watch General Chat for guild advertisements, take a look at the guild forums, or just ask in general if anyone is recruiting for their guild. In terms of servers, the big difference is that a PVE server requires you to "flag" for world player-versus-player combat, making it consensual. On a PVP server, you are always flagged, which can be a lot of fun, or can lead to you getting killed ("ganked") by much higher level players against which you have no chance. If you are easing yourself into the MMO concept, it might be less frustrating to start on a PVE server for now. In terms of RP or not, RP servers generally have stricter character naming rules and the communities tend to place a hard division between out of character ("ooc") and in character communications, with the latter typically preferred. Hope that helps you get started!

The server you last played on is stored in an .ini file here: C:\Users\*username*\AppData\Local\SWTOR\swtor\settings\*swtorusername*_AccountDev.ini I'm only playing on one server so I don't know for certain whether this is a reference or whether you can use it to change the behavior you're seeing, but you can edit the file and put the server name you like in and see what happens. Make a backup copy of the original file before you start! As an aside, I've seen a few people with issues apparently related to updating these .ini files, it seems like SWTOR may be having issues keeping its permissions straight on these files.