Many physical processes are described by elliptic or parabolic partial differential equations. For linear stability problems associated with such equations, the inverse Laplacian provides a very effective preconditioner. In addition, it is also readily available in most scientific calculations in the form of a Poisson solver or an implicit diffusive time step. We incorporate Laplacian preconditioning into the inverse Arnoldi method, using BiCGSTAB to solve the large linear systems. Two successful implementations are described: spherical Couette flow described by the Navier-Stokes equations and Bose-Einstein condensation described by the nonlinear Schrödinger equation.