This was posted on the EQMOD forum, I thought it might be useful to those who like the pretty but who have normal laptops.
"Subject: Re: [EQMOD] Advice on software crash
You have the ability make stellarium as resource hungry as you like. Not many other allow you to do this. Edit the config.ini file and change the video fps min and max values down from the defaults. I use 1 and 6 respectively and I get 2% cpu demand on p4 with 1G ram. I'm able to run all my other astrophoto apps without a problem. I find the latest version of stellarium to load the fastest and most stable.
Todd "