All In, but still a NOOB! Latency an issue....still

Hello All,
 
I had an older system with XP, and was in the throes of upgrading to X2 but wanted to wait until I upgraded my system.  My "older system" was a Gateway I purchased in 1999.  Got some miles out of it, but couldn't upgrade it any longer due to changes in motherboards over time etc.  So, I went all in with a new system (specs in signature), upgraded to Win 8-64, and thought the new hotrod would overcome all issues.  And I am still, by all means a beginner. 
I had laid some midi drum tracks and decided to put some guitar tracks in as well, only to find the latent signal all but impossible to play along with the beat.  Felt like it was a full second off and behind the drum tracks.  So, I researched in the forums and found the most likely 2 reasons for latency and messed with the Preferences, buffer size slider, reduced the playback & record I/O to 64 & 128.  Turned off all effects and input echo.  Still no luck.  I was able to activate the MOTU CueMix console and get real-time quitar audio, and fed the drums to the Cuemix console, and recorded, but upon playback, the latency remained.  I also read on here, someone said you could put a negative value in the Record Latency Adjustment (samples) in Sync and Caching Preferences but I couldn't enter a negative value in the Manual Offset, only 0 or higher. 
I'm thinking I need to learn how to edit the beginning of the guitar track to align it with the beginning of the drums to get it all synced and in time.  Seems like a round about way to do this and I may be missing something.  My resources are this forum, YouTube, Sonar X2 Power! and the internet, but have found little in the way of getting pointers on how to address this.  Oh, and I subscribed to the Groove3 All Access Pass as well. 
 
Wow, that was long-winded....any tips?

Thanks gswitz, will keep that in mind!

When tracking audio (e.g., a singer), I have to open the ASIO driver window in Preferences and go way down to 128 or 256.  Then, when mixing, using Melodyne, etc., I go back up to 1024.

I have a guaranteed way to set latency offset perfectly to the sample. Unfortunately, I don't have good screen-cast software, so I may want to hand it to Fast_Biker_Boy and see if he'd want to include it as an additional video in his collection. But it uses the metronome and looping it's playback into another track to record. From that, you play back the audio of the recorded metronome into yet another track. Between the first recorded metronome, to the second one (sourced from the first recorded one), you can actually measure how many samples off your latency is from ASIO's measured latency. In my case, I had to add a manual offset of about -44 samples. btw, this also requires your ruler to display samples.
 
This measures factual latency of your system, with only the aid of your ASIO driver's measurements. But it doesn't require ASIO. ASIO just gets it closer. If you're wanting perfect, to-the-sample latency offset, this works for me every time.