Lightroom 4 and Laptop Specs

[Centropolis]

I recently bought Lightroom 4 and put it on my Windows laptop. My laptop has an AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-Core CPU (PassMark CPU Lookup), 4GB of RAM and onboard graphics.

After using it a few times to edit RAW files and batch exporting, I find that my laptop really works hard but it’s just too slow rendering RAW files. It lags when I do rotating and cropping. Mind you, the RAW files are from a D800 so they are large size files but when I zoom in 1:1, it takes about 5 to 10 seconds before it finishes rendering.

I am thinking of getting a new laptop since this one is more than 2 years old. Based on the specs of my current laptop mentioned above, where do you think the major bottleneck is? Obviously all 3 but what would make the most improvement relatively speaking? A much faster CPU, 6GB of RAM or really all I need is a laptop with a separate graphics card and not onboard?

Now, I understanding by buying a laptop with a separate graphics card, the chances are that the CPU will be newer but it may not necessarily come with more than 4GB of RAM. Laptops with a separate graphics card is significantly more expensive. Do you guys thinking just looking for a newer CPU and 6GB will significantly improve my experience with LR4?