I think you just have to push it as far as you can budget wise.
I mention Beyond above but as yet in truth there are no system recommendations available for version 2.0 as no-one has a finished version! I'm sure Pango will make it as light as possible or enable extra heavy features to be turned on / off if necessary. Its best to be prepared though so everything runs smoothly.
I still have a philosophy for PC's which everyone on here might not agree with, but its buy the most powerful one you can afford.
Buying the cheap is always a false economy in my book. Businesses that buy pc's that just do the job, always end up with staff waiting around wasting time for systems to respond to their commands and that in turn slows productivity.
Let me give you an example:
2 friends of mine who are brothers both come to me for pc advice (a few months apart - I'm not in IT just a friend). Both have businesses trading mobile phones. These are desktops BTW but same applies to laptops.
Brother 1 decides he doesn't want to spend a lot so against my advice buys a £499 desktop pc with low spec - nice largish flat screen but quite low spec. Brother 2 takes my advice and buys the most powerful pc he can afford - in fact spends more than I advised and spend £1200 on a cutting edge pc with the latest dual core, huge memory, graphics card etc.
Brother 1's pc is ok at 1st but quickly slows. Within a year, booting takes well over a minute. Everything he does involves a wait of 10-20 secs. Not only frustrating but slowing his productivity as he's still waiting for one job to respond when he could be doing another. Within 18 months, he's waiting up to 5 minutes for thing such as Excel to respond and booting takes 3-4 minutes. He saves a lot of Excel data and has hundreds of emails a week. He buys another cheap pc. Same tale again. Ok at 1st, slows very quickly. To this day 6 years later, he's on his 2nd pc and still waiting for things to happen, albeit not as slowly as before.
Brother 2 spends £1200 on his pc. Its lightening. Instead of him waiting for the pc, the pc is always waiting for him! 6 years later hes still on the same pc and although it has slowed a little over the years, its still booting in around 30 secs and even now its not holding him up in work. It still responds fast enough to out pace the speed at which he can input data or open programmes.
Moral of the story here is Brother 1 has lot thousands in wasted time waiting for his pc and he's bought 2 pc's already. Brother 2 has wasted no time and has only bought the one.
In my book, always buy the fastest you can afford. It future proofs you against future software, future updates that add more features and thus requirements and it gives you something that has longevity and guarantees fast working.
In your case I'd concentrate on getting an all round pc that's as fast as you can afford and has separate graphics at a good level. Don't however chase great graphics at the expense of other areas. Whilst it might help with the preview function and with 3D ultimately the processor and memory and hard drive are far more important for the type of programmes you will be using. The fastest graphics are fine for gamers. They also eat the most money! For anything else, go mid range and concentrate on processor, HD and memory.
On a laptop, the single biggest factor I believe for slow working is hard drive speed - get a 7200rpm HD. A 5,400 rpm will kill the performance and booting times.
Get a dual core of reasonable speed i5 if possible, i3 if not. Get as much memory as possible ideally 6GB + but 4Gb at a push if budget restricts. Also personally, I'd get as large a screen as possible unless you're going to connect and external monitor as the larger the screen the easier it is to operate. Personally I'd rather carry a 2" wider bag than struggle to see what I'm doing on screen of have the programme 1/2 way off the screen.
Just my 2 cents.
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