Photoshop cs5 "OpenGL Drawing(3D performance)" PC vs mac?

[Kim]

I'm having some problems with using photoshop CS5 on my laptop.
First, I can't enable "OpenGL Drawing" because Brush storkes get really slow.
Because of the reason above, I can't use 3D rendering.
If I enable OpenGL and try 3D rendering, then Photoshop gets really slow and crashes all the time.
What I can't understand is when I use IMac at school, I don't have any problems like those I explained above. Further more, the IMac doesn't have much different spec than my laptop at home except it has much bigger space of hard drive. So my question is, does the hard drive effect photoshop's performance a lot? or simply my HP laptop can't do the job?

-spec comparison-
IMac at school : I think it has latest OSX.
Core 2 duo, 2gbs or ram, 1tb hard drive

My HP laptop :
Probook 4510s, windows 7 64bit, core 2 duo CPU P7370 2.00GHz, 4gb of Ram, 320gb(40gb free space)
video chipset on my laptop - ATI Radeon HD4300

 

[Kris]

you will definetly have the upper hand seeing how you have a graphics card and alot of these types f programs need graphics cards (videocards)
anyways you also have more ram as well.
in my opinion (and feel free to disagree)

your laptop succseeds in ram and graphics.
get and external hardrive of 1 tb or grater and you'll be good.

western digital is a really great brand as well as seagate for external hardrives <my two favorite.