Depends what you're laptop is and what way they're encoded.

What are you playing it with?

I can play 1080p movies on my laptop FFS... Are you sure that's the problem?

Any dual core and graphics card of about £100 should do the job more than well enough, above that depends on budget obviously.

only have a 3400 xp athlon

If it's a downloaded film it's normally done by the graphics card these days.

I've got an e6550 and a radeon 3850, none of which are that fast anymore and it plays all my hd stuff fine.

just got a new 1080p tv so connected it up with a dvi to hdmi cable, after a lot of messing on with it finally got it to display 1080p 24hz :thumbs:

now most of my movies are just divx rips thought id try a 1080p movie, frick me it doesnt even move didnt relize how hard 1080p movies were on a processor, so need to upgrade my processor and motherboard now.

Any one run 1080p movies and what processor do you use, im guessing a dualcore will work, or should i just quadcore, not been keeping track of processors so whats the deal at the min?