Most laptop drives are only 5,400 RPM which would make a transaction likeyou are describing likely take a while.Not sure what my one is but it is new(ish).
If you're doing data intensive operations (like a big update which looks like what you're doing) it will write many megabytes to the harddrive... my laptop HDD (5400 rpm) does about 15 MB/s throughput while a standard desktop 7200rpm drive does 55-60 MB/s throughput. Plus, seek times on a laptop drive are horrendous.
