Hello,
You might want to open up your Task manager, and see what processes might be bogging you down. You can also open up the Performance Monitor, and examine the various CPU information. But I would also look at the swap information.
I am guessing your laptop is slightly slow, and you want to tweak it. You might find a bunch of little processes slowing your computer ever so slightly, and then one process out there taking the lion's share of the time.
For example, on Mac OS X, I found that the Palm Desktop USB monitor was taking about 10 percent of my avail CPU time. (side note for neat Mac/Unix/Linux feature called top: you can see how much time your processes have consumed the processor). I don't need the USB monitor running 24 x 7, so I optimized my computer to launch that transport monitor when I really need it, and to kill it once the Palm application closes.
Take a look at your Task Manager, and let us know.
Christian