Thanks for the replies. I'm thinking now that maybe the issue for me is/was memory. Just to see what would happen, I loaded EIC onto our 2 year old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5030 with 4GB of memory. It uses some type of integrated graphics. Strangely enough, EIC runs great on the laptop. It's not choppy at all. I still think the 3D graphics are just useless fluff, but the game does run smoothly.
I also loaded EU3 onto the laptop, and it too runs fine. On our desktop PC EU3 takes about 15 minutes to load and is really slow and choppy.
Victoria 2 also works well on the laptop.
I vaguely remember the guy at the store telling me, when we got the laptop, to just buy the one a step down from what we were looking at, and then just buy some additional memory and add it, which would basically give us the same machine as what we were looking at, but for less money.
Up until now I have been playing Victoria and CK1 on the laptop.
Maybe now I'll buy CK2....
