There was a time when it was easy to find the startup folder to check what was loading at starup.
 
Now, in Win7...I am unsure I have actually found it.
 
I almost remember back in the day you could remove programs from that folder...now I am lost.
 
Any quick guidelines for me to pursue on my laptop, thanks.

Good ol msconfig and then select startup tab is one way in win 7 to disable tbos pesky load on startup apps. Needless to say check anything you are unsure of before removing. My next stop is usually to the services area to see which of those are enabled and running. There are various ways to get there and I am typing on phone now. I will check later and post exact steps if unresolved. I disable things like remote desktop and remote startup ( which I never use anyway) and any other service that is useless to me. Next stop is Device manager. There is debate as to whether it is necessary to disable onboard audio in addition to any additional audio drivers from Nvidia. Great discussion on that topic started by Craig Anderton.

In an earlier post, you indicate the Wi-Fi is 'not hooked up to anything'.
 
Can you please elaborate on that?  The reason I ask is that many times a Wi-Fi adapter on a laptop can cause massive, but intermittent, DPC Latency spikes, that can cause all kinds of problems for streaming audio applications, such as Sonar.
 
What I do, and many others as well, is to either use a hardware switch (if present) to turn off the adapter just prior to launching Sonar, or go into Device Manager and temporarily disable the Wi-Fi-adapter - again just prior to launching Sonar.  It can be enabled or turned back on as soon as you finish working with your Sonar session.
 
Bob Bone
 

hey dan, 
I have used a usb 3 drive to record to and it was unspectacular.  it was bus powered, which was a big part of the problem.  if you're going down this route i'd recommend buying an external, powered enclosure and putting a 7200rpm non-green drive in it.  i've seen some people go this route and find it rather successful - i think it was in a reaper forum.
my solution for my laptop was to pick up a dvd bay hard drive caddy, pop out the optical drive and replace it with a wd black 7200rpm 750gb hdd.  works a treat.

Don't know if this is relevant or not, but a lot of people running Macs with hybrid SDD/magnetic drives seem to have had big dropout problems. There are loads of threads about this on any Mac DAW forum. The solution there seems to be to replace the hybrid drive for a cure SSD or pure HDD. Some people claim to have got rid of the dropouts by putting the OS on an external USB HDD and spooling the audio to the internal hybrid.
 
The problems seem to happen even if the audio is being streamed to an external USB/firewire/Thunderbird drive. The most popular suspected culprit is the OS or the drive itself shifting data from flash to magnetic storage as it feels the need - including the OS swap file.

I'm not ignoring everyone...
 
Well...yeah...I kinda am.  But I have real work to do in the interim.
 
I'm going to work the DPC angle over the weekend and see what I get.  I looked at the results of LatencyMon, which has implicated tcpip.sys, wdf0100.sys and ACPI.sys.
 
I've also seen Craig's thread on disabling the audio driver for the onboard audio...and I'm considering the possibilities on that too.
 
Oh...Task Manager is showing 5 (five) network connections.  The Ethernet port, BlueTooth and WiFi account for 3 of them.  But I have no idea what the other two Wireless Network Connections are.

Ahhh Laptops, the bane of the DAW world. I normally only have to disable a few things, I did a test once where disabling things in MSconfig does little but make for a faster start up on booting. The DPLAT test did not improve after disabling a dozen services. Mostly those stay idle.
Software that checks for updates, ya but it cannot do that if there is no internet..
Open device manager and disable your wireless and the battery management for starters,
Those are the 2 biggest hogs.
Don't let any software auto load on start up.

Go into control panel/device manager and disable (not uninstall) the wireless networking adaptor before recording. Wireless networking is absolutely notorious for causing audio dropouts,