Update:
As Steven McMahon has pointed out in his blog post related to Plone on Windows 10, use MS Visual C++ compiler for Python 2.7
when compiling. I found that the resulting setup ran 10 times faster (or at least felt that way).
What I don't know at the moment is how to specify which compiler gets used for Python on Windows. The easy solution was to make sure only the MS Visual C++ compiler was installed.