Slow playback framerate in CS4

Hello all,
I am having issues with playback framerates inside of Premiere CS4. I realize there is a similar topic currently open for discussion, but I have my doubts as to whether our problems are related, so I went ahead and posted my own thread.
I just bought a new Dell laptop (system specs below) about a month ago, and loaded Production Premium CS4 on it to start editing (after installing all the updates, of course.) My issue is this: Whenever I play any kind of video inside of Premiere, the framerate is very choppy (i.e. 15-18 FPS; it looks like cell phone video.) This happens with any format I try to play, whether it's DV, HDV, or anything else. The video plays back fine outside of the program, so the files are fine. Also, it doesn't matter whether the video is rendered or not; it always plays back at the same choppy framerate. As a side note, I had the same issue when I loaded the same video into After Effects (no effects, just straight video), but when I did a RAM preview, it played perfectly.
I have tried editing this same footage on my desktop, which has inferior hardware, and have had no problems. I've brought over the projects from the desktop on an external drive to test with known working projects, and I get the same result. My sequence settings are correct, all of the drivers are up to date, and the hard drive data rate is very good. My main guess is that something with the video card is not playing nice with Premiere; I am not a big fan of ATI, but it was the only card I could get when I purchased the machine.
Any advice or tips would be very much appreciated; thank you in advance for your time.
Dell Studio 1558 Laptop
Intel i7 1.6GHz
Seagate 500GB 7200RPM HDD
4GB RAM 1066MHz
ATI Radeon HD 5740
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Harm and Bill, thank you for your advice. I realize that a single drive is below system requirements, but I have edited both HDV and SD video on a single drive without problems for several years; not the ideal setup, but it works for my budget. Also, and I failed to mention this in my earlier post (sorry), I have tried editing the footage off of an external USB 2.0 drive, with the same results. Again, I know USB 2.0 is not ideal for video editing, but it has worked for me for several years. As a side note, my friend can edit the same footage on a Mac with a single 5400 RPM HDD with no problems.
As far as tweaking the system, I have set up several Windows machines for editing, and my process is similar to Harm's article on setting up and tweaking a Windows system; in fact, I think I picked up several tips from it a while back. I have re-read and made sure I did all my usual fixes, and still have wierd playback.
But now on to the progress I have made. I was playing around some more and discovered a semi-solution: If I don't have my magnification mode set to "Fit" in the monitor, the video plays back fine. However, if I set the magnification mode to 100% and then resize the window to fit, I get choppy playback again. 75% is as large as I can get the playback window with satisfactory results.
This to me seems to lead away from the HDD being the problem. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the hard drive would read the video at the same rate regardless of how big Premiere was displaying it.
Again, thank you both very much for your time and advice!
-JP

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Slow playback framerate in CS4

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