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I'm trying to download bitcoin core (ultimately want to run a node off my laptop). However the blockchain seems to be taking a (very) long time to download. I've read in some posts it might take up to a day, but this is taking way too long.
Any feedback/changes you suggest?
It's normal for it to take a long time, the whole blockchain is >120 GiB at this point. You can download a bootstrap.dat torrent, but at this point, as you have already a lot of it downloaded via Bitcoin Core, it won't be any faster.
On the other hand, perhaps you would want to reconsider running a node. 120 GiB is quite a lot and you neither can hope for block rewards nor is your security any better* compared to a light wallet, such as Electrum. There are many other light wallets, I just don't know much about their security.
* See below:
Simple Payment Verification (SPV) is a technique described in Satoshi Nakamoto’s paper. SPV allows a lightweight client to verify that a transaction is included in the Bitcoin blockchain, without downloading the entire blockchain. The SPV client only needs download the block headers, which are much smaller than the full blocks. To verify that a transaction is in a block, a SPV client requests a proof of inclusion, in the form of a Merkle branch.
