Issues with recording stopping and starting during recording

My guess is you buffers are set too low. 

For whatever the worth, I record using an ASIO Buffer Size of 128 samples, and that seems to be a good balance for my system and hardware.
 
I have tested going down as low as 32, but had some issues and raised it, eventually settling for 128, which I never seem to have to change, while recording.  (when moving on to mixing, I bump it up to 1024, to allow for effects with look-ahead processing and such).
 
I also suggest you look to see if you have your laptop's wi-fi adapter enabled, when you are running Sonar.  The reason I mention it is that wi-fi adapters are notorious for causing massive DPC Latency spikes, which can cause intermittent dropouts, crackles, and such.  Soooo, what lots of folks do is to shut off their wi-fi adapters, either using a switch - if available, or they go into Windows Device Manager and disable it their, just prior to launching Sonar.  Then, when they finish their Sonar session, they turn the wi-fi adapter back on, or enable it, and then web access is immediately restored.  That seems to be quite helpful, so again, I urge you to give this a shot, too.
 
Bob Bone
 

same here, I can ocassionally get away with 32 or 64 early on in a project, but 96 -128 seem to be pretty stable for me. what bit depth are you recording at? Did 8 PE have PDC(plugin delay compensation) button? If not, you may want to run lean when recording to reduce latency.Disable whatever plugins you can while tracking. That will help all the way around.