Haven't been able to play because of the holidays, but now I'm home, I can finally get back to the adventure.
As Mike mentioned, Smithing and Alchemy are probably the best crafts in the game to learn and improve. Creating your own armor and potions is a huge advantage. Granted, you'll still find lots of special armor and weapons during your travels, but it's nice to have a backup plan. Another thing about crafting in Skyrim is that it seems to be a lot easier to grasp than in past Elder Scrolls games, although, if real alchemists sampled their wares as much as I do, I'd think their life spans weren't that long;
"Hey I wonder what this plant does?" "Dude, eat it, and find out."Skyrim can be pretty demanding on hardware, but it does have lots of tweaks you can take advantage of. This has been the case with every ES game since Daggerfall. As already pointed out, the game's developer, Bethesda, has patched the game's initial problems with memory addressing and it is much more stable now. This will continue for a long time, since Bethesda has big plans for Skyrim beyond the initial release. In addition to bug fixes, there will be new content patches, as well as the inevitable expansion or two, and the Creation Kit, the tool used to build the game, will be released Real Soon™, and the mod community will then create years' worth of content for the game. So, if you think about it, buying the PC version of the game now is an investment that will keep paying for itself.
Having said all that, I can't blame anyone for not wanting to deal with the PC glitches and going with the console versions of the game(all official patches are pushed out automagically through PSN and XboxLive). Trying to keep up with the latest hardware advances is almost impossible, and it's easy to get caught up in an endless cycle of what I call 'upgrad-icide.' I have't built a custom box in about 10 years now, and I'm currently running Skyrim on an Alienware M11x laptop. Certainly not top-of-the-line, but it does have a decent CPU and a pretty good graphics card(Nvidia GT335M), which is key for these kinds of games. I've got it plugged into a 24" external display, so I have enough horsepower to run the game decently and show off the occasional cool screenshot. It's not bleeding-edge, but it's sufficient for a few years' worth of decent gaming without breaking the bank.
The key for these games is having enough system memory in Windows (at least 4GB of RAM) and a decent video card with at least 1 GB RAM onboard, neither of which are very expensive these days. But if you'd prefer to avoid the headaches of tweaking your computer, you can just get the PS3 or Xbox360 versions of the game, and you'll still have a great time.
