bitcoind sync time incredibly slow
Yes there is. The bottleneck is I/O speed and normal HD drives are really slow. You can move the chainstate directory (around 3GB) to an SSD. If your laptop doesn't have an SSD you can use an SSD thumb drive. 

There are instruction how to do that in the wiki. I did that using an usb stick SSD and the whole chain synced in a liitle less than 12 hours.