Final Fantasy VII Issue

I'm trying to run FFVII on ePSXe and I can't seem to get it running properly. As it starts, 'Sony Computer Entertainment America' is very slow to fade in. I'm running it with the actual disc of FFVII and have looked at the possibility of using other emulators, but considering I've completed the game dozens of times in the past, I want to mess around with cheat codes a bit for another playthrough and I haven't seen any cheat code functionality with other PS emus. I didn't see any menu options that would allow me to input any, and I also didn't see the ability to use the psx emulation cheater with any emu aside from epsxe.

Admittedly, I'm trying to run the game on a rather outdated laptop but Chrono Cross runs fine, so I assume there's either a plug-in or a series of plug-ins I need for FFVII to run fine.

My specs:

CPU: Pentium Dual-Core / T4400 2.20GHz
RAM: 2 GB
OS: Windows 7
GPU: Mobile Intel 4 Series Express Chipset Family

ePSXe Plugins:

psx emulation cheater 2.5
Pete's OpenGL2 Driver 2.9

ePSXe version 1.9.0

have you tried comparing speed with loading from an ISO instead? I sometimes find loading from disc to be slower. Other than that, I can't think of anything else wrong but perhaps change the graphics plugin to petes OpenGL 1, or Petes Direct X plugin. If you need more plugins, you can go to http://www.pbernert.com/html/gpu.htm