Speeding up IDL on slower laptops:
I had a customer come in requesting suggestions to speed up IDL on an old laptop which may not have the most RAM or processing power.

Some suggestions technical support has for these situations are the following:
1. Check the rendering method for object graphics in IDL Preferences. From the IDLDE menu bar, via Window > Preferences, select IDL > Graphics. Make sure the Hardware option is checked for the "Rendering Method for object graphics" selection, as opposed to the Software option. Generally, hardware rendering is faster than software rendering.

2. Check out the Refresh method under the Window function: https://www.harrisgeospatial.com/docs/refresh_method.html

The Refresh method enables and disables the refresh (drawing) of the graphics window. This method is useful if you are doing a large number of graphics updates and you do not want to see the intermediate steps. Using the KEYWORD example, like so:

graphic.Refresh [, /DISABLE]

will turn off updates when rendering intermediate graphics. This can be toggled back on via a removal of the /DISABLE keyword, which can speed up graphical processing on an older machine.