Dell Latitude D630 not able to support Blu-ray playback

I ran PowerDVD 9 on my Dell Latitude D630, which has Core2Duo T7250, 4 GB DDR2, and Nvdia NVS 135M, running Vista x64. I was surprised how bad the quality was with Blu-ray playback. There was a significant amount of frame loss. I used to think the laptop as being able to do some heavy lifting, but apparently not so, at least for Blu-ray decoding. I'd guess the bottleneck is with the graphics core (rated at 3.8 by WEI, lowest among all), which isn't designed for this kind of task.

UPDATE: Same software works fine on a Dell Optiplex 760 with Core2Duo E7300, 2 GB DDR2, Radeon HD 3450, and Vista x86. GPU score is 4.3. CPU might be a factor too, now I think. The WEI on this machine is 5.5, while on the Latitude is a meager 4.9.

Dell 968 refused to install program on a Pentium M 1.7 GHz laptop

It said processor speed was too low.  CPU was running at 347 MHz (according to Computer Properties), probably the result of SpeedStep.   Can't believe the installer could be that clueless about CPU speed...  Anyway, went into Power Options and disabled CPU power management.  After restarting the installer went ahead.  Will turn back on the power management later.

Windows 7 RC (x86) on VMWare Server 2

The installation was mostly eventless - and how cool was that!  VMWare runs on Ubuntu Hardy server and I selected Vista as guest type (adjust memory to 512 MB).  The only issue was at the step of setting password for the first user.  The O/S froze up for a few minutes.  The mouse cursor was barely movable...  I could tell something was hogging CPU, since VMWare portal showed full usage of the CPU.  Things were fine after that, except that the next few config screens (time zone, etc.) just flew by, probably because I pressed Enter too many times during the freeze. :)

Windows 7 feels pretty snappy, even running on a modest P4 2.8 GHz with no virtualization assist and 512 MB memory.