Actually very true. An old e4300 or e4400 can be picked up extremely cheaply on eBay. Not to mention if you pair them with a decent cooler they overclock like lunatics.

I keep planning to do this, but then I remember that sanity is good. How bad does it get near the end?

His rig's an AMD platform and he's got DDR1 RAM, so I doubt the mobo supports dual core processors. That's going to put his upgrade cost a bit higher (CPU, mobo, and RAM)

I missed that part. However a cheap Biostar mobo is not hard to find and they are superb overclockers. RAM is always cheap. I'm sure I can find two sticks of 1GB DDR2 for a cheap price.

Frustrating... but extremely rewarding. I died around 5 or 6 times during the endgame (three of those times against the final boss), which probably lengthened the playtime by around an hour or so.
If you ever get to playing on insanity difficulty and decide to play vanguard, just know that you will die A LOT because of biotic charging into an enemy only to see that there are 3 more behind him guns blazing at you, but it is immensely rewarding when you somehow get out of those situations alive.

Back on topic for a bit: Is it just me, or does the game force you to act like a complete asshole half the time... and then give you paragon points for it? I think my code of ethics and that of the game designers clash a bit.

It seems to be based on what Bioware think is right. The same can be said of Dragon Age: Origins.
***Spoiler***
Prince Behlen is an utter and complete prick and Harromont the natural choice. However to get the 'good' ending for the Dwarves you need to support Behlen. It's morals based on a big picture you are not privvy to. I'm sure the same is in ME2, the morals are based on what happens in ME3 which only Bioware know about.

Oh yes I forgot about that part. That really did make no sense at all. Lazy writing? Bioware? It does seem you get paragon points for using persuade no matter how it's used.

Bioware really disappointed me on that one. I completely expected that plan to backfire which I why I did it in the first place. Frankly, I expected the store owners to confront me or something... but nothing happened.

There's also the problem that you get Paragon points for giving the name of an innocent to Liara, when you're helping her find out who's the shadow broker's accomplice. You get paragon points for pointing assassins at the wrong target? Yeah, that didn't devalue the morality system in the slightest.

My mobo supports dual core. the first amd dual core socket 939. you cannot buy those anymore. only ebay which lists them for min. 100 AUD (90 usd) minimum. and all are used. :D
so i would have to replace mobo, ram, cpu... my psu is 430w so it might not be enough for dual core especially since 4850 min. is 450w.
five hundred bucks minimum :D
cannot afford that as i need to save 2500 bucks before end of june/mid july.

your psu should be fine. ive got a quad core hd 5850 and 4 gigs of ram and my 430w psu runs fine.

Similar situation here. People talk a lot of crap that doesn't apply much in actuality. :)

Yeah, that part is a bit hinky. But there is a bit of rationalization for it. If you go through all the dialogue and flat out refuse to help Liara at all, she essentially says "Ok, well, if you don't help us narrow down the search, we'll kill -all- the suspects." So the justification here is that yes, you pointed the hit squad to the wrong person and killed an innocent, but in doing so, you prevented four other innocent people from being murdered as well.
It's not an ideal solution, obviously, but it's the lesser of two evils. And it's the sort of thing that ME2 is going for, I think. The game is intended to be a lot uglier than the first one. The middle parts of trilogies always tend to be. It's where all the -nasty- happens. Just like Empire Strikes Back was the darkest film of the three, I think BioWare is trying to make ME2 the grittiest of the three games. So there's much more moral ambiguity in this one than the first one. That's certainly reflected by how previous NPCs react to you. Kaidan/Ashley, for example. Garrus becoming much more the vigilante even if you tried to "straighten him out" in the first game. Tali hardens up after losing her father. And Liara, who was probably one of the more well-meaning and naive characters in the first game, undergoes a pretty significant personality shift in the second.
It makes sense from a narrative standpoint.