laptop sound terrible

I just got a new Toshiba Satellite L770 series with quadcore amd A6-3400m processor.  Playback using Windows Media Player or something on Youtube sounds ok, but the Yarkin demo in X1 is bubbly.  And just having session drummer run a loop also sounds flaky with a normal amount of latency, but with buffer size to maximum sound quality improves but is till not acceptable.  Every so often X1 reports that the sound card is "missing".  I've run the wave profiler few times and messed around with settings but getting nowhere.  It wants to run the soundcard in the WDM/KS mode.  I am running at 16bit 44.1khz.  Would anything be gained by uninstalling 64bit version and going to 32bit version?  Or go back to 8.5.3?
 
I am going on lengthy vacation and want to bring along my electric guitar and fool about; thus, I was hoping to get this sorted on my laptop.  I'd just like to know at this point whether I am doomed and wasting my time, or if I keep at  it I might be able to get this thing to work passably.  Any ideas?

Was this working for you before on 8.5.3? Do you have an acutal hardware interface attached (not the native sound chip set in the Toshiba)? Don't confuse the internal sound card (designed for multimedia applications) with an pro (or semi-pro) audio interface (designed for low latency multi-track recording/playback).  In the mean time you may have better luck with the freeware ASIO4ALL drivers. (Not a substitute for an actual pro interface, but it may get you by for a short while with your native Toshiba sound chip set).

Playback on a laptop should work fine once you install ASIO4ALL - I've been on laptops for years.  ASIO4ALL is free.  You may have to disable the HD sound on your laptop.  However, if you want to record into Sonar on a laptop you'd be better off with an interface of some sort.  If you want something small and built for guitar you might try a pocket pod. 

MANY thanks folks.  Asio4All solved the playback perfectly!!  Yay. 

Thanks again!!!