Originally posted by Pocus: I dont have perf issues. I have CPU usage issues. Thats different.
Many laptops are notorious for having (cheap) graphics chipsets that leave most of the work for the CPU to do rather than the GPU.
As PDF just said, turning off the background anims should ease your woes.
BTW, by my way of thinking, CPU usage is a performance issue. Performance isn't strictly just about frames/sec, or how long something takes. If you cannot multitask because some app has hogged all the CPU cycles, that's still a performance issue, since you cannot properly use your machine to perform the tasks you wish to do.