In the window that you draw all you nurbs and such and choose the view and stuff I can bee adding nurbs and joints just fine but when I go to change the color or edit something the screen blanks out and wont come back till I click it so it is hindering my ability to learn this program could it be a bad install or is it that my laptop is not powerfull enough to use this program

My laptop is a compaq presario f700 it has an amd 62 x2 processor and an nvidia mobile graphics card and 2 gb of ram

I am using maya 8