Desync error during online play

Hi all,

Played my first online match of COH2 last night with a friend. I've been playing offline with AI a bit and experience absolutely no issues what-so-ever.

However last night I was getting desync errors constantly, there was a lag time from order to unit movement by about 3-4 minutes. The game never froze, but it was running very, very slowly.

During the first game my settings were all on low, the map loaded quickly but desync error occurred after 5 or so minutes.

I then turned graphic scaling (apologies if thats the wrong name for the field) to 50% to try and eek out more FPS. That actually made it worse, for the second game the map loaded very slowly and I got desync errors as soon as it loaded.

I've done some research and have since turned off the replay function by disable write permissions to the replay folder.

Is there anything I can do to resolve this? I'd love to play this with my friends and actually be able to enjoy it, as this is a great game!

My laptop stats are:

CPU - i7-4710MQ Quad Core (2.5 GHz) (stock clock)
GPU - GTX 850M (2.0GB ddr3)
RAM - 8GB DDR3
HD - 128GB SSD

On my laptop I found that the game was never using more than 10% load on the CPU and total RAM usage including O/S was 4 GB.

Oh sorry to add I'm playing it on Steam and have performed a verification of game files which was all OK. Anti-virus etc is clean too.

Thanks!