Jonathan Fay replied on 04-05-2011 4:00 AM
You *do* want Areo on, turning off will actually slow things more.
The warped dome mode requires at least 5 rendering passes to first render a cube map and then render it to the warp. Some features are very GPU intesive, and many mobile GPU's may have a difiicult time rendering one pass, much less 5.
There are a few things you can do to improve the performance. Asteriods and orbits are very intensive, turn turn off minor orbits and asteroids to star with and see how that helps. Also you can slide the "Image Quality Slider" in thesettings tab.
Use the Settings...Advanced..Show Performance Data to show the frame rate while you test these settings.
The back screen can be to do using large textures on a machine with a smaller display resolution. Try turning Large textures off to fix this.
There is also a alpha version with some very significant full dome improvements that I can get you if you would like to try.
Also the Gt 420M is the slowest of all the 4 series cards. It is 5-8 times slower than the midrange desktop cards, and 10-20 times slower than the high-end cards, even with the best software optimization, this won't perform like a good desktop GPU.
Jonathan