Hopefully it is a proper laptop and not a netbook as they vary massively with what can be changed and what is soldered or custom ports.
Anyway programs are typically limited by one or more of three different things
1) RAM amount
2) CPU speed
3) Hard drive speed
There are more subtle tweaks like CPU not supporting the fancy instruction sets, RAM speed being slow (timings don't matter so much but the speed can) and of course some things actually use the GPU to do stuff (likely not inkscape though) but we will skip that for now. Also being a laptop you likely can't replace the CPU and even if you can you probably won't want to find a replacement (if there is even one worth having).
You get to figure out what is the limiting factor. Inkscape is wonderful but I get the impression it will take all it can get on every front, and then more if you decide to go for plugins and complex pictures.
You can get some idea of what is doing it by simply using task manager -- if you have no RAM when it is open and doing things then you have that, if the CPU says 100% or a single core is 100% then probably CPU, and hard drive can be harder though it might tell you in one of the other tabs, you can also load down the hard drive by making it copy things around and seeing if that slows it further.
Increasing hard drive speed these days usually boils down to "buy a SSD and make sure the program uses it, this might mean making it your main drive". Your laptop might have a way to replace any optical drive it has with such a thing, and there are also various flavours of PCI, esata, m.2, u.2 and more besides but most will just get a SATA drive and replace their laptop drive with it.
For the space they can hold SSDs cost a lot. As well as size you also want read speed, write speed and IOPS as stats to look at.
RAM amount varies a bit. Traditionally you mainly had to pay attention to the type of RAM and its clock speed in addition to the amount you wanted but today you may also have voltage to worry about.
There might be a laptop out there with more than 2 slots for RAM but they are super rare. You will more likely have two slots so make sure you are getting the relevant amount of sticks -- desktop computers often have 4, 6, 8 or more slots and thus can stack things far more.
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html will give you an idea of what is in there and hopefully either tell you outright or at least something to search for to get a compatibility list/specs.