It sounds like you are also possibly overheating. You don’t have hardware decoding for av1 on that computer so it’s all cpu work. But from my extensive use and testing with AV1 there is nothing about your hardware that should fail to play back 1080p 30fps av1 video.
On the contrary. I want my device to be as out of the way and unobtrusive as is possible.
I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don’t like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don’t give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it’s just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I’m fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn’t bother me.
Spare yourself a lot of wasted disk space, Windows stupidity, and RAM by just using any mainline Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu) instead of Windows for the guest. I don’t even mean a headless Linux. You can keep the GUI if you prefer and want. That will still be a small fraction of the ram, compute, and disk space for the VM than a Windows guest.
And a tip for the technique: don’t download torrents into the virtual hard drive for the VM. Download into a shared/mounted directory.