Grunt?what grunt does your laptop have?? it should still select it...but it will freeze if you do.
cheers bullet
You mean just render a scene with IPR to see the results?It's definitely a hardware issue, laptops are not ideal for Maya and the integrated graphics card would not support high quality rendering in your case. However this is not a problem, because the only thing you get from choosing high quality rendering is a better approximation in the viewport of what things will look like in a render than you would at default which is useful for aiming lights but not essential as you can just render instead to see the map So it has nothing to do with the final output of the normal map itself. To speed this up you can use the IPR for tests.