Wayne,
Most of the problems with video on laptops these days is that the video card uses shared memory. In other words it is borrowing Ram from the main memory. There is a site that has a lot of good tips on background processes you can turn off that will help free up some more memory. This is the site:
http://www.blackviper.com.
How much memory does this laptop have?
And are your other laptops Vista or XP?