Maya is very slow when working in polygon surfaces mode

Maya is very slow when working in polygon surfaces mode

I have a fairly powerful system (2.8Ghz Intel Pentium Dual Core, eVGA 8800 GTS Superclocked, 2GB DDR2 Crucial RAM) but when i turn on the mode to render polygons as flat surfaces (by pressing 5) in Maya 8.5 Personal Learning Edition it slows down to a practical crawl. As i recall, it ran faster on some dinky old Compaq laptop with an integrated graphics card (in that mode of course)!