Asus G50VT-X5 Laptop (FPS Issues From Hell)

So me and my girlfriend both bought new laptops from bestbuy this week:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9173262&st=G50&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1218044029168

From what you can see the specs are as follows:
4GB Ram (PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM)
320gb (7200 RPM)
9800M GTS Nvidia Graphics (512MB GDDR3)
Intel Centrino 2 (2.13ghz)

windows vista home premium x64.

------------First i'll mention my problem, and then what i have tried.----------

COD4, Sims2, GTAIV all run without a single hint of lag. Believe it or not this system has a console that allows overclocking.

What troubles me is FFXI has been a real nightmare. To even get the windower to work i had to disable two IR (infrared) devices in my device manager which are for facial recognition.

Finally i got the windower to work without any issues, so i get logged in... fix my configs and settings... i notice some lag so i hit F12...

12FPS... what the ***... so i think.. whitegate... sure itll happen. i move me and my girlfriend out to party in east ronfaure [s] and we both hit 3-5 FPS off and on. It seems the colibri wings moving somehow worsened the situation.

------------onto what i have tried--------------------------

1) i uninstalled trend micro which came with the laptops but wasn't running. i read it messes with the system anyhow. (also uninstalled useless bloatware which wasn't much honestly)

2) i tried xp compatibility with administrative rights and visual things disabled. same exact fps.

3) i found a forum mentioning a modded .inf file and older nvidia drivers people reported to have worked with the 8800's or whatever. so i gave that a go. same fps issues.

4) updated to the latest nvidia drivers. same fps issues.

5) disabled search indexing as another possible solution i read about when searching ever forum under the sun. also stopped the service windows search.

6) disabled QoS packet under networking.

7) checked the process pol.exe and tried to affinity it to a single core. same fps and no performance increase.

8) tried double triple quadruple checking my FFXI settings, they are the same as they are on my custom built PC that runs 29.4 and never even flinches. However i even tried running the game on shitty settings and resolution... same fps no change in performance.

9) opened up nvidia console to try and mess with those settings, but knew this wouldn't help as FFXI runs from the CPU and barely anything from the GPU.

10) banged my head against the desk several times and bandaged my fingers from so much searching on google/ffxi forums to no avail.

does anyone else have a G50 laptop or 9800M series card that fixed the FPS or can help determine my friggin problem...

it's amazing that i can run any game on high settings (COD4 on high runs incredibly well) but a game as dirt old as this functions horribly. -.-;

thanks for hearing my rambles... and thanks ahead of time for any help i may receive.

It's a problem with any cards above 8 series cards in that you experience terrible performance issues in some parts of the game, regardless of your settings. I play on your same laptop. There's really nothing you can do because it's hard coded into the game and FFXI/NVIDIA don't want to get off of their lazy *** to fix this. It's really a shame. This is the same with my other computer with a GTX285.

Try and disable bump mapping & set shadows to off. That should fix some of the lag in the game, BUT the majority of the game will still be very laggy just because of the faulty coding with FFXI. It sucks, yeah, and I don't know when SE is going to fix this.

PS: This is a really cool laptop for anything else I agree 100%... it's just ***w/ FFXI.

so is this a vista only related bug for nvidia? installing XP is an option.

Why do I have 0 problems with a 9800GT and a 9500m GS then?

Are you getting 29.4/30 FPS 100% of the time?

I saw somebody who got a GTX260 and they were doing fine too apparently, so I there may be exceptions.

Also, i'm not sure if XP will fix it. It didn't fix it with my desktop (the one with a GTX285), FFXI runs flawless on my older computer though. (much weaker specs, and with an 8800GT)