Check to see if ship animation is disabled or not. I suspect that the laptop has it enabled, and the desktop has it disabled. It is in the game options menu somewhere.
Thanks for your reply but that didn't do it. I found out it had to do with weather I was playing the cd music or not. It's probably the SB Live! card. It seems to have incompatabilities with a lot of games.
Something reported that I've noticed is that if you have run Window's media player once after bootup before you start to play SE4, the ship animation is fast and jerky.