Main Menu/Tutorials performance is extremely choppy

Hello, I just downloaded the GalCiv2 with DA and TA today and noticed that the game is running really sluggishly when I'm trying to select a race to play as. It also seems to not want to play the tutorials without pausing the animation/audio. When I'm just hanging out on the actual main menu, with the space ships or whatever flying around in the background, they seem to pause in mid-animation while traveling across the screen. All three versions (DL, DA, TA) are having this problem for me.
I'm playing the game on my laptop, a Gateway T-1625. It runs on Vista Home Premium, AMD Turion TL-60 2GHz, and has an ATI Radeon X1270. Some help would be awesome. It's kind of stressing me out that I can't watch the tutorials so I know what I'm doin'.

Thanks!