That laptop is probably too underpowered to handle:
* Red October HQ
* Some kinds of DSD decoding
* Substantial use of Convolution filters
All of which require a fairly potent CPU and/or GPU resources (the latter is especially important for ROHQ).
For video playback, Red October Standard should work without issue on that machine. You may also be able to create a custom Red October "Medium Quality" setting that uses MadVR but has acceptable performance with a bit of elbow grease. There is a nice guide for this on the Wiki here:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Madvr_expert_guideHowever, you would
absolutely be best served by starting with simple, known-good settings and then working your way up from there.
If the problems are more generalized, and apply to all sorts of content (not just more esoteric things as I described above), then the Troubleshooting Guide would be a great place to start:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Center_Troubleshooting_GuideIn particular, pay attention to:
* Audio setup, as discussed by Matt above. Further help is here:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Audio_Troubleshooting_Guide* Anti-Virus. Some AV packages can have a substantial performance impact on your computer generally, particularly when the machine is otherwise somewhat underpowered. You may need to "tame" your AV package for decent performance on that system (described in the general guide linked above).
* Disk performance and Library location. MC really, really, really wants to have its Library files on a fast, internal disk (by "Library" I mean the database it uses internally, not the media files themselves, which can live anywhere). Details:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Troubleshooting_Network_and_Slow_Storage