Not sure if you have a TI which is streaming audio over USB, but are you sure the current source of the slowdowns is computation (CPU) speed?
Overall, the first scenario (Virus arp on, longer notes in DAW therefore less MIDI ON/OFF chatter over the wire) should be more efficient in terms of the amount of data that needs to go back and forth, and that should be easier both on the laptop CPU (but only slightly, since arping notes on and off is not really that costly), but the real savings is just less MIDI data to deal with.
That said, I've always found whenever you have a timing sensitive operation (arping/gating etc) on an external device that needs to be perfectly in sync the host device, getting them to cooperate sometimes comes together on its own, and other times is a chore, so to that extent the efficient solution might actually be harder to get rid of the slowdowns you hear sometimes.
Hope I'm not insulting your intelligence with this one but with your budget laptop are you using the internal audio card to handle ASIO? As I said I wasn't sure if you're using a TI so I'm not sure what your audio interface situation is.
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