Just an update. I finally purchased my new laptop. I decided to go with the sager 8278-s, configured with i7-4810, 32 gig ram, 256gb-sshd, 1tb 7200 hard drive, win 8.1
 
I finally have sonar all set up on it, that took some time to get everything from my old computer right.
 
Latency as checked with latencymon runs less than 75ms, so I'm pretty happy with that. Sonar works flawlessly so far and the increased performance has been great.
 
To keep things from getting out of hand, I intend to never install any software or drivers that aren't related to using sonar.
 
So, to implement that I did have to install one thing, virtualbox. I'm running virtualbox with a win7 virtual machine and installing anything I need in there. That way I can shut down the virtual machine and have a pristine machine for running sonar.
 
I'm also running portable apps (portableapps.com) for email and a few browsers. Nothing in portable apps gets "installed" in your system, they all run out of a directory that you can either put on your hard drive or on a mem stick. Hopefully this effort will keep sonar running well for several years.
 
gbow

Wow - that's a DREAM machine, for sure.
 
I am glad that worked out so well for you.  It is amazing how much power we can get these days with laptops, and desktops too.
 
Bob Bone