Hello U48Kriegsmarine.
From what I've seen my guess is your video card is the culprit. Rendering water is not an easy task.
Regarding your laptop I would strongly advice to install windows Xp, if you can find drivers for Xp at HP. I have an Acer 5920G laptop that came preinstalled with Vista Home premium. Needless to say, the next day after searching the web and downloading drivers I installed XP. Why? Because Vista is a crappy OS. It needs a lot of horse power from a pc or laptop,and is eating ram for breakfast. For example when I had Vista installed the os and its background programs needed around 700mb of ram while with XP only around 300-350mb are needed. Also keep in mind that on Vista games are running slower than on Xp.
To get back to bussines now. You need to make sure your video card drivers are up to date and directX version also. The link below is for directX:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en
What is your laptop complete designation? Tell me, maybe I can help. It will be easy to find video card drivers at HP. I had the same problem finding drivers for my laptop video card. It has a Nvidia 8600GS mobile and the drivers from Nvidia's site did not work, only those from Acer's site wich is bad because you can't update video card drivers, wich generally improves performance.
Another piece of advice is to buy yourself a PC for playing games. I know is very hard in these dark times but if you can do it and use your laptop only for wath was meant to be use: mobility. You don't have to spend a fortune on a gaming rig. From your signature I can see that you are from Georgia. Is that Georgia from USA or Georgia the country from Europe? Because if you are from USA you are lucky. The prices there on pc components are a lot lower that in Europe. You just have to know what you want.