Well, sometimes things can solve themselves.... Last night my laptop did a major Windows update, and lo and behold today I have been working with sketchup and it's running just fine. Even rendering works without glitches and bugsplash. Sorry to bother in this matter. Laptop is a Lenovo G50, came with a 1 TB HDD, 16 GB ram, I7 dual core 3.5Ghz processor