Well, I can't say I agree with everything said here. I have 2 systems I play on the most, both thru the same 10/1mb cable internet connection, 1 is hard wired the other is wireless. Both run 64bit vista home premium. I have 1ea win 32 bit xp 2.0 ghz amd x2 opteron 2.5gig ddr and a win7 64bit 2.0 ghz amd x2 opteron 3gig ddr machines here, that play the game just fine also. All my desktops were built by me and were not top of the line when I built them.
I used comodo dragon as my browser for playing this game and nothing else.
System 1 is a 3.0 ghz core2quad intel with 8gig ram, and a nivdia gtx260 graphics card, hard wired internet and mouse. I play on this system every night, have 8-10 apps that use the cpu, memory, and internet heavily, along with 2 video feeds, open and running at all times. It runs these apps 24/5 though out the week, gets rebooted on the weekend. It does have a fast 640gb WD black hard drive. It is also a server to 3 other computers in this house, 1 hard wired 2 wireless. And I skype on it when playing without problems. I built this machine for multi tasking 4 years ago.
When this system gets a laggy meter I flush out the flash and browser and continue on.
System 2 is a 2.4 ghz core2duo intel 6gig memory, HP laptop (hdx 16-1160us) has a slower 5400rpm hard drive. Is wireless thru a linksys 54g router, with a wireless mouse. It does have a dedicated nvida 9600m 512mb video card. When playing on this, I don't run apps in the background, but do have a spreadsheet open from my main system wireless. I can run skype at the same time as the game without problems.
When this system gets a laggy meter I flush out the flash and browser and continue on.
I will get metered on both systems a few times a week, I can live with that.
I have read countless threads on this and see the following things consistently on systems that don't seem to have the buggy meter problem.
1 - A dedicated browser set up just to play this game.
2 - memory, the more the better
3- a dedicated graphics card with >256mb of memory, the more and the faster the memory the better.
I have played the game on friends computers that were bought, most will play the game without problems. If I encountered problems on those machines, just adding the dedicated browser fixed 80-90% of them to be playable.
This is just to point out how different these 4 systems, and the bought systems are but most if not all will play this game just fine.