Legion Y530-15ICH Poor Virtual Machine Performance

Hey everyone, I got the legion Y530-15ICH (model: 81FV00NCAX), and I have an issue in that vmware VMs (freebsd-based) that were running on my old windows 7 core2 duo machine flawlessly are almost non-responsive on this higher spec'ed laptop (cli-based, command output that should be printed out instantly takes maybe 20 seconds or more).

Old machine specs: windows 7 pro, core2due E8400, 6GB RAM, AHCI SATA HDD

Legion specs: windows 10 home 1803, Core i7-8750H, 16GB RAM, 250 nVME + 1TB HDD

I tested the same VM running on the same VMware player version 7 on both devices, the old pc runs it perfectly while legion stutters. I tried many vmware players/workstation versions (10, 12.5, latest 15) but the result is the same. Bios has virtualization enabled, I tried putting the VM on both nvme ssd and mechanical hdd the result is the same. Task manager does not show any abnormal behaviour on CPU/RAM/Disk usage.

Appreciate any help on the matter