My guess is it IS to do with your graphics card or maybe just general speed of your computer. From my experience, laptops especially don''t come with very good graphics cards and are slightly slower probably because games don''t often look very good on LCD displays anyway. Even on my computer (500MHz) bought just 2 years ago my graphics card can''t handle 32bit colours on a 1024x800 screen setting (unless I bought a new graphics card). This would probably be the best for running openGL programs on a laptop:

16 bit color
600x800 screen resolution

I hope that helps.