Part of the problem is that on a laptop you have shared memory for the video card instead of dedicated memory. This has been a cause of most of the laptop problems but there is nothing you can do about that. A lot of people open the Singer's Database and Search before starting a show and either minimizing them or sliding them down out of the way of the main screen. This keeps them from having to load information from the database each time you open them.
One thing you can do to help is go to
http://www.blackviper.com/ and follow their directions to turn off as many background services and programs as you can. This cuts down on the memory use by XP and should increase your speed a bit.