Laptop processor/graphics card for x264, H264

[RickyRicardo]

I presently have a Toshiba L305, 3 years old, with an Intel Centrino 2.0gz and an Intel Graphics card and cannot play x264 or H264 without severe stuttering and freezes because of the severe compression, I assume. I live in a very remote part of the world and cannot do any hands on research, but I'm looking at the Toshiba i5 machine with the Mobile Intel HD Graphics with 64MB-1696MB dynamically allocated shared graphics memory, but want to know if this is going to be fast enough for x264 and H264 videos. The NVIDIA GeForce 310M with 512 MB dedicated card option is also available for the same price, but I read in some forum or other that the Intel Graphics card was "optimized" for H264..Anyway, anybody have any strong information or thoughts about this...maybe actual experience with either of these combos..No games, just videos..And, obviously, I'm not real familiar with these topics, so please use non-tech whenever possible...
Many thanks in advance for your thoughtful responses..

[hech54]

What player are you trying to play these videos with?

[RickyRicardo]

Well, that certainly turns out to be an interesting point. Up until now, I've been trying on almost exclusively on VLC, quicktime and DIVX..and since there didn't seem to be a bit of difference between them, I assumed that it wasn't a player issue. But after making this post, and looking at new computers for about a month, I just happened across a reference to KMPlayer in this site, and that seems to play the x264 files I had saved as test files, just fine..So, maybe I saved a grand, whatdaya think?