Lok sucks anyway, you're not missing out

Thats actually a REALLY weird one.  Usually the open maps are fine, and it's busy (Cities + Endor) which cause framerate issues.  This will totally screw up space maps for you, but try turning down view distance, see if anthing improves. 

Whare are your system specs?

Screams laptop to me, if not, then its a generic desktop computer.

Which is where your problems creep in I'm afraid, so, what you need to do is make sure you have the graphics set to the lowest possible settings, and make sure you have the game set to run at the native resolution of your monitor rather than it trying to resize it as well.

Ok, you're running Vista, not a favourite OS for gamers, and very hard work for a laptop to run, even with the 4gb ram, thats because you're on a mobile/laptop CPU which will no doubt be running on a lower voltage and not as fast as it's desktop equivalent.

So, to claw back some performance, turn off all the Vista nice things such as Aero. You can also do some research on the net to find other services you can turn off which will claw back some more ram and CPU for you. Turning those off and disabling their start up options will also help it boot quicker as well.

If you're playing it over wireless then you will get bad lag and possibly a framerate drop. Thats because wireless just can't compare to a wired connection for gaming, and if you're in an area where there is signal intererence you'll lose packets. Try testing your connection at speedtest.net, they also run a ping test so you can see how you fare with your net connection on wireless and wired and see the differance.

I do run 2142/FS on my laptop from time to time, it's similar to yours but runs Windows 7 and has dedicated graphics. I still have to turn the eye candy down and get horrific lag a times!

Bite my shiny metal Tie Fighter!