[feldon34]

That ATI Rage 8MB chipset in your wife's laptop is working its tail off to produce 20fps. There has been quite a bit of optimization to keep the Aquarium working on 8MB cards.

In contrast, the GeForce MX440 in your supertower isn't even breaking a sweat, being capable of producing a few hundred frames per second on your setup.

If you had a CRT monitor, then I would make some suggestions on tweaking your settings, but on an LCD, things don't really "refresh" so to speak so I think you're in perfect shape.

CRT monitors refresh 60, 72, 75, 80, etc. times per second. The image is "painted" and then has a few nanoseconds to start fading before the next painting happens, which is almost a flash because it is so bright. Your brain glues together the distinct frames into motion, but 60 or, even worse, 50 flashes per second gives me a headache and is very fatiguing on the eyes.

So that is why you have people doing all kinds of tweaking to turn up the refresh to 75 or 85 and then, separately because they are not tied together, setting DirectX to run at 75 or 85 as well.

But this is not necessary on your LCD since it does not refresh in this manner.