Question

I may want to over compensate to be sure the laptop can handle a heavy workload. I have a 10 year old dell studio laptop that has 8gb of ram and an I3 processor. This laptop works ok but is starting to break down. I am using studio one 4.

Answer 1

I have a ThinkPad X390/i5-8350u that's good. I believe, T490s uses the same motherboard, but comes with a larger screen.

general advice: go with SSD, 16G ram and modern i5 (I can tell than Whiskey Lake performs better for realtime audio than Kaby Lake-R). also google for 'dpc latency laptop_model' before buying, cause some Windows laptops are just bad for audio production and you cannot do anything with it.