Didn't look up the spec's on your system, but I'm assuming that is one of the Intel chips that also has a GPU on-die. FFXI has problems in general with those laptops with the Sandy Bridge CPU's that also have a branded GPU in them. nVidia has been working on drivers to address the issues with many games, but I don't recall seeing where they have been resolved for FFXI yet.

Most people have opted to disable the nVidia GPU in the Device Manager, forcing it to run on the Intel solution on the CPU. This seems to work best for most people. So, if you see both Intel Graphics and nVidia Graphics listed in Device Manager, try disabling the nVidia to see if it helps.

Otherwise...it can be any number of things. A lot of the time it is an issue with software running in the background. In the past, there were issues with multi-core CPU's in general along these lines. The solution many resorted to was opening task manager and assigning the pol.exe process to just one core (affinity) by right-clicking it in the list. To do this, you will need to be able to minimize the game. If you want to test for the affinity issue, here's some how-to's for setting affinity (one is using Task Manager, the other is setting options in your shortcut that calls the program):

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows...on-in-windows/
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/