Here are some tips which help:
First, download DPC Latency Checker here:
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtmlRun the app, you should ALWAYS be staying solid in the green area no matter what.
Then here are some steps to improve performance:
1. Disable your wireless card (go to your network connections and right click+disable on the Wireless Connection). This usually has a profound impact on performance with a lot of laptops.
2. Disable Power Management for your video card. This varies as far as how you do it - you'll have to do some reading.
3. Disable Power Management for your computer, CPU, and PCI bus (PCI power mgmt is usually in BIOS). Depending on what brand laptop you have, you'll want to disable the app that it uses for power management. Otherwise go into the Power Options in your Control Panel and change it to the scheme called 'Always On'. Also try your best to get into BIOS and see if there are any power management options there to disable.
4. Increase your ASIO latency on your soundcard. This is sometimes the root of the problem, but I typically have found that most cards out there can get great latency figures if you just take the time to do the optimizations first. I wouldn't settle for anything above 256 samples. Ideally you want <128 for best performance.
5. Supposedly change your processor scheduling to 'Background Services' may help performance. I've never seen this one have a profound impact, but I've heard the suggestion kicked around a lot. Go to control panel>system>advanced>performance settings button>settings>advanced tab.
6. PCI Latency Tool will let you set the time that each PCI device is allowed to access the PCI bus. This is one of those things that is a real shot in the dark, because most machines nowadays have most of their latency timers locked. You can try tho.
7. Check the tuning tips on MusicXP.net and read the optimizations article on n3m0nic.com
Um, lets see what else... Defrag your hard drive regularly, etc.
I think that's about it.
