There are quite a few solar leasing companies in the USA such as Solar City ( affiliated with Tesla Motors), Sungevity and Sunpower. If your home's roof is suitable, you can have a 20 year agreement for no money down.

There are already 2 AC underwater cables between Spain & Morocco, in operation for over a decade and there are several HVDC cables over 100 miles long; one is almost 400 miles and carries up to 700 MW. and has exceeded revenue expectations from the outset.It's the NorNed Interconnector.

It's been done - most of Europe is one large interconnected grid; something that is only now happening in America.

I expect things will be much improved in the Southwest when the Tres Amigas Superstation goes online but it's something that should have happened between several other American grids years ago.

In many cases, it's still hundreds of miles between power plant & consumer. That's one of the things that is so attractive about rooftop solar - power is produced right where it's consumed.
If the utilities had a lick of sense ( and I hope some did ), instead of fighting against solar, they should have been the ones to start the solar leasing, thereby getting the production credits & subsidies for themselves, have long-term leases with their own customers & less strain on their transmission grid.

There's more to grid demand than baseload and, at least in America, the peak production for solar is the daily demand peak for electricity.
So much of the South and Southwest is prime for solar and as yet has only made modest use of it,even in California. Texas has many GW of wind farms but almost no solar by comparison, a shocking oversight, given that they sometimes go months without rain and stretches of days above 100F.

Why assume that the cost of spinning reserve has not or is not being factored in? The utilities were gaming the system to get paid exorbitantly during times of high demand and now that the renewables are eating their lunch, they want to take their toys and run home?

I'm tempted to say let them fail - and then their assets can be had for pennies on the dollar by someone who takes the long view.

That's one huge upgrade but you'll need a VERY fast connection to really take advantage

jACkass, we are talking about the GMA950.
Sandy Bridge HD / HD2000 / HD3000 are much more capable than that old graphics chip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

It wasn't back when I used it, before switching to my 1st GeForce card.
In fact, it was one of the reasons I decided to build a new machine with a discrete card.

And my point was that I get the performance I do and am able to do as much simultaneously because so much can be offloaded to the GPU.
And even that's not enough for when I really go overboard.

I decided to check to see if it would support my programs. It didn't take long to hit a roadblock.

Requirements for Office 2013 - http://office.microsoft.com/en...

Hardware acceleration Graphics hardware acceleration with DirectX10 graphics card

According to http://www.intel.com/products/... , there's no Directx10 support from this board.

Er, no. The less that can be passed to the video card, the more for the CPU to do.
Maybe in 2008, 2009 the GMA might have been enough but not today when browsers expect to be able to GPU-offload.

And it was never all that well supported under Linux from what I remember which is one reason I moved to Nvidia - yes, binary-blobs but i was getting tired of lame graphics.

Not on this desktop of mine, it won't.
The Chrome GPU process is at 512M; Flash at 2.5G and I'm at 93% RAM usage - I typically run out of RAM several times daily but refuse to pay the current cost to upgrade to 32GB

Did you read jedididah's comment above mine?
I did specifically ask what he considers "normal day to day use".
What I specified is the case for 80% of the 10,000 users that my organisation supports. And even so, there are fewer than 500 that have anything beyond a stock, onboard Intel graphics card.

At home, I have a 9600GT but it's only now after perhaps 4 years that I think it's becoming the bottleneck in my main system despite 2 CPU & RAM upgrades in that time.

Probably not on Windows 7 and not with very recent versions of Office, FF, Chrome and Internet sites.

What do you consider "normal day to day use"?
In my experience, starting with Sandy Bridge & HD3000, it's been acceptable for Windows office desktop stuff, Office apps, web browsing, online streaming, etc.