Yeah, laptop graphics are a bit odd, as even if you have a 'dedicated' GPU, it shares a lot of the same physical pathways and such as the onboard, so things get oddball. Laptops also sometimes have different drivers than their desktop counterparts.

Yes, Turning those settings down isn't a real fix, it's more of a way to try and give you a bit more stability in the game before it crashes.

I seem to (haven't gone back and counted) have longer stretches of playability when I'm not in any ARR or DT areas, of course, this does limit what one can do if they are trying to play the current content.

The errors in Event Viewer are just some of the multitude of little tiny MS hiccups they haven't fixed, and have nothing to do with FF14. I've watched the event viewer while playing and nothing from the game has ever popped up.

Ultimately the things I was mentioning are just things SE will have you try if you ever get a hold of them, so you can cut them off at the pass sort of and save some time. Hopefully for you, me and the other people with this issue someone starts seeing a real issue and gets it fixed.