More Power!
There are a few things you can do to enhance VMware Player's performance. These may sound like common sense, but because VMware is really just another system running on your host system, they're particularly important.

• Defragment the host's disks as often as possible. Members of the VMware community recommend doing so on a daily basis. With VMware's disk files often consuming gigabytes of space for a single file, even a little fragmentation can significantly impact performance.
• On systems with ample RAM, disable memory trimming. According to information located at the highly useful blog site virtualization.info: The blog about virtual machines and virtualization technologies, products, market trends. Since 2003., VMware regularly checks for unused virtual memory to return back to the host OS. This permits more concurrent virtual machines, but incurs a performance hit. Disable this by adding the line MemTrimRate=0 to the virtual machine's .VMX file.
• To reduce page file usage, VMware uses a page sharing technique that allows guest memory pages with identical content to be stored as a single copy-on-write page. This decreases host memory usage but consumes added system resources. You can disable this by adding the line sched.mem.pshare.enable=FALSE to the virtual machine's .VMX file.
• Disable anti-virus real-time scanning on .VMDK and .VMEM files. These are the files that contain your VM's virtual disk and virtual memory. When a VM is active and running, the vmware-vmx.exe process regularly reads and writes to those files. If your anti-virus' real-time scanner has to scan every read and write, it can slow down the effective performance of the virtual machine.
• Create all virtual disks as "pre- allocated.” When a virtual disk is created, the user has the option to increase the size of the disk as necessary or create the maximum size of the disk all at once. By pre-allocating the entire disk, the system doesn't incur the performance degradation associated with re-addressing the additional space as the disk gets bigger, and the disk is less likely to become fragmented in the process.
• For highly resource-intensive VMs, consider separating out the virtual machine's physical disk drive from the drive with the system page file. For even better performance, try three drives—one for the system disk, one for the virtual machines and one for the page file. This alleviates disk spindle contention during periods of high use.