UPDATE: So after looking around a bit, the newer of the two laptops has a somewhat poor support for sRGB which is of concern for the sake of photo editing (at least, for when I travel -- when at home, which will amount to be about 2/3 of the time in reality, it won't be an issue as it will be plugged into a calibrated monitor with good sRGB and Adobe RGB Support, but my concern is for the times when I travel (which in some cases, is a few weeks at a time so I likely will need to edit while traveling). The SP7 is also one of the loaded-up models so it has plenty of memory and storage space as well, so I did at least opt for that option when I bought it (although part of me wishes now I had given up portability for power but at the time, two years ago, it seemed fine for LR Classic -- but this was prior to advanced AI tools being added to LR /PS).
Second thing is that the newer laptop has a newer style secondary storage connector, but I'm finding that it's so new that viable options to fill the storage slot at this time is rather rare, and the ones that are available are generally not brands that I recognize (and seem to be limitied to 1TB or less, which poses a second problem of storage, as I would probably eat through the remaining storage within 1-2 years after I load my current photo library).
SO... I've decided to check out a video card for my desktop instead as a cheaper alternative ($150 for an AMD RX 6400 which is a budget gaming Gpu but should help out with some of the issues -- mainly using a lot of AI masks in LR I found, as I had two crashes yesterday simply because the CPU graphics was not good enough).
As to the first point about the sRGB Workspace, I found my Surface Pro 7 has over 90% of SRGB coverage so for travel, I will likely stick with that. I just have to be careful about using AI masks and keep in mind that the tablet will be slower than my desktop (the issue is more how the iGPU uses memory more so than the processing -- it's still slow, but in comparison the SP7 seems to have fewer issues with LR despite being a bit slower. But considering this whole thing came about because the experience on the desktop with the iGPU was pretty bad, it's still an upgrade, but perhaps the video card will be all I need for the next 2 years or so (in the end, I'd like to get something like an Asus ProArt laptop but those are about $2,000 USD so rather than spend $800 on a "temporary fix" for a laptop, I'd rather spend the $150 on the video card and put the remaining $650 into a laptop found (which would be about 1/3 of the way there already, so maybe tax time 2024 I can pull the trigger on a photo editing laptop). The SP7 is slow, but tolerable I guess. (Importing and when using a lot of AI masks seems to be the biggest hurdles for it, but it does "work"). Looking at some benchmarks, the Intel graphics is not that far behind the Ryzen graphics in reality (20% slower, but I think the way it's implemented with Ryzen processors and shared memory, it can be a problem and is likely a wash when it comes to LR in terms of performance between the two). The RX 6400 should make editing on my desktop much more tolerable and useable since the iGPU will pretty much not be doing anything, and thus all of the system RAM can then be allocated to programs.
Thanks for the suggestions. I will definitely get a newer processor with whatever I get, whenever I decide to pull the trigger on a new laptop (a laptop intended for media creation, not a gaming laptop as I'm finding while they have the technical specs and speed, the displays are not very good in comparison to what my SP7 offers).
