coding horror link
Run the VM on a seperate hard drive, this will improve the disk IO since the host machine’s hard drive and the VM’s can spin separately from each other.
If possible, use an external SSD drive, especially for Sharepoint development. SSD will improve performance dramatically.
Make sure your VM have sufficient RAM for development. Upgrade the host machine to have more RAM and allocate more to the VM helps a lot.
Optimize the VM’s OS and app settings, disable unused services and applications.