I have a Macbook Pro. Nuff said.
Seriously now though: You should try to turn off some advanced texture filtering and Anti-Aliasing first. Those soak up huge amounts of CPU (in other words they make your pc lag more) and should reduce the amount of crashes you encounter while hardly reducing visual prettyness.
If that doesn't really help you should lower the texture quality of ships and structures and uncheck the Display Asteroids, Dust Clouds and Trade Ships boxes. If that doesn't help, well, off you go to the local Alienware dealer...