I hear you both! I have been using my laptop for blender as my old desktop is on it's last legs and while the laptop has a dual core processor it has a weak graphics card so I too have been using the CPU I found setting the preview to stop at 10 samples helps and when I render I set the render samples much higher, and when I render it's a great time to go grab a coffee

Hopefully it will be just a couple more days then we will be getting a new PC to replace "the Beast" I'm looking forward to trying cycles on a better computer with a good graphics card.