I'm a little bit more familiar with how Premiere utilizes your system than After Effects, so I'm not sure how much insight I'll be able to provide. Also, since you're only dealing with pictures, I feel like it shouldn't weigh too heavily on your system. Those things being said... I see that you're working on a laptop, which, right off the bat (unless it's made to handle compositing or video work in general) means it's going to have a hard time, simply due to the smaller components, smaller fans, less cooling space, etc. vs a full-size desktop. You mention this being the first time you've tried After Effects, but have you been able to run any other Creative Cloud software in the past? Your CPU is four years old and only has 2 physical cores. From my understanding, multi-core isn't as important in AE as it is in PrPro, but the age and speed may be impacting performance. The GPU being a laptop card isn't going to help your renders, and I doubt your secondary integrated graphics card is helping much either. As for RAM, After Effects requires 8GB minimum to run, but Adobe recommends 16GB at least to get decent performance. Basically, I think your issue lies in outdated or slow hardware, which I know doesn't have an easy solution. Maybe start with updating any drivers from the manufacturer's website.
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