My main travel laptop is a few years old at this point, and rather than replacing it purely to speed up raw processing, I went looking for actual settings changes that make a real difference on hardware that isn't current. Some of this is obvious once you know it. None of it was obvious to me before I actually went looking.
Preview resolution is the setting most people never touch
Working previews built at full resolution slow down every single adjustment you make, and dropping preview resolution to a smaller size for the culling and rough-edit pass, then rebuilding at full resolution only for final export, made the single biggest difference of anything I changed. It sounds like an obvious trade, and it's genuinely underused because the default settings don't nudge you toward it.
Smart preview generation, worth the upfront time
Generating smart previews at import, a compressed proxy file the software edits against instead of the full raw file, adds time upfront during import but pays that back many times over during the actual editing session, especially for anyone editing away from the original files on external storage where read speed is already a bottleneck. I generate these automatically now rather than only when I remember to, since the upfront cost is small and the ongoing benefit is consistent.
- Drop working preview resolution during culling, restore it only for final export
- Generate smart previews at import, especially when editing off external storage
- Close background apps specifically before a heavy batch export, obvious but often skipped
The honest limit of settings tweaks
None of this makes an old laptop as fast as new hardware, and for genuinely heavy batch exports I still plan around the machine's real limits rather than pretending settings changes erased them entirely. What these changes did was make the day-to-day editing experience, the part that happens far more often than a big export, feel responsive again instead of fighting a spinning cursor on every adjustment.