Also might we worth checking that you have enabled all the virtualisation extensions for your processor in laptop bios Antivirus apps can take up a lot of resource, but normally this should settle down or be limited to a dedicated scan period. Some apps also are effected more than others by them. It could be a reason for your slowdown, but it is not necessarily the reason in this case. Is there anyway you can disable the anti-virus for a short period to check, or is this a company owned laptop? Also worth checking, what are the resources you are assigning to your virtual workload. If the virtual machines are taking most of the laptop resources, this can slow down the whole machine. Try to run a small 2 cpu 4gb ram vm to see the effect.