Last time I tried something like that I was using a Z800 dual Xeon system with 48 GB of RAM. It ran slower than remoting (VNC) into the server and running it there. Of course the server was using even higher end hardware then I had. On a lower end laptop running a virtual machine will probably not meet their expectations (unless they are pretty low to begin with). I regularly run a VM on my windows 7 machine at home (for web browsing, email, youtube, netflix, etc) and it does okay, but when I try running a Xilinx Vivado simulation it's not so good (partly because I have to allocate so much RAM to the OS and don't have as much available for the Linux OS, i7 (2nd Gen) 2.2 GHz 16 GB)