Best Laptop for Adobe Captivate

I have been using Captivate since version 3 - several years - several computers.

I can honestly say that I do not recall needing to perform the whole cache clean or preferences clean thing.

For many years, I used to work as a network admin and did some home computer work on the side. Hands down - my largest computer service was helping with the "slow computer".

Majority of the time - running some virus scans and clean up utilities - deleting browser extensions or other programs/services that simply didn't belong or were added  without the users knowledge, disabling startup programs and services among some other things was enough to get the system running like new.

I am hesitant to claim that Captivate is the culprit here. While it may make some demands on a system, I personally don't believe those demands to be crippling to your system on their own. Rather it is the accumulation of other junk over time that crowds out and hinders the performance of other legitimate programs. I have found that malware and other garbage are by far the largest contributor to the slow computer.

I have run Captivate on lesser systems than you have just fine but I am extremely judicious about sites I visit and things I click on or install to my computer.

A good tech should be able to look at your laptop and examine the other things that are running in the background that shouldn't be and get rid of them.

I know this does not quite answer your question but I do think it is a step towards solving your problem which my gut says it is due to other garbage software not Captivate.

That is where I would start - have a good cleaning/tune up done.

From a hardware standpoint - If you have an extra slot in the laptop - I would toss in an additional 8 GB stick of RAM as it is a relatively inexpensive, yet noticeable performace upgrade.

That laptop should be fine to run Captivate 2019. More RAM would not hurt, but Captivate does not usually use more than a couple of Gig of RAM unless your projects are very large.  How large are your CPTX files?

Cleaning out the cache after you finish each project is always a good idea.  But one of the main reasons Captivate runs slowly is because many users don't realise they should never work on project files that are stored on a network drive.  CPTX files should always be downloaded to your local hard drive BEFORE you open them with Captivate, and save and close from Captivate before reuploading to the network backup location. Is that the way you always work, or do you open files from the network?

Set up special folders at the C drive root level (not inside your My Documents folder) and set these folders up as your Default Locations for Project Publish folder and Project Cache folder.  Have you done this?