It's probably a combination of memory and graphics card. Technically, Autodesk does not support anything short of a Quadro GPU (Great if you have a couple thousand to spend on a graphics card that hardware wise is not much different then a GeForce. They justify it by saying the driver development for the Quadro costs more ... Cough Bullshit Cough!).
They are aware that people are using Geforce cards and accidentally borked the drivers around revision 55ish so the Geforce drivers would not work with Maya, I believe in attempt to force people to buy over priced Quadro cards.. They were content to state that Geforce cards are not supported until people started switching to ATI cards and then all of a sudden the Geforce drivers miraculously started working again. Anyway, it's not overly surprising that a laptop starts to have problems with models that are approaching the density of your model. Memory starts to become critical at that point especially if you are running a 32bit OS which limits you to around 1.5GB of usable memory.
The model up this point looks outstanding.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
Last edited by ctbram; 14-07-2011 at 08:26 PM.