Latency Issues with Sonar 7 Home Studio XL

Hi all,
 
I recently purchased Sonar 7 HS XL and a new recording interface (Tascam us-144).  All I'm looking to do is record some guitar/bass parts over some drum tracks....pretty simple stuff.  However,  the recording latency is KILLING ME! When I manually try to lower the latency, I get dropout after dropout and Sonar seems to kick my Tascam to the curb. I have no idea what to do, any ideas?????!?!
 
PS My old and CHEAP M-Audio interface and some 50$ recording software didn't have ANY latency issues whatsoever, and I am seriously thinking about using that stuff again.
 
My PC specs arent spectacular, but I'd think 3GB of RAM, and a 2.1 GHZ processor would be enough to power this puppy without problems syncing my tracks nice and tight because of latency issues. I would really appreciate any comments whatsoever.
 
 
 

I think I'm going to have to disagree with CJ here on part of his post since the US-144 is a USB device and not firewire.
the other part of his post, however, is correct where you fix your latency.  change to ASIO driver mode and then if you still have high latency you need to decrease your hardware buffers in the tascam driver software.

Thank for all the posts guys, I'm gonna give ASIO driver mode a shot.  Zungle, it was just some cheapo Fast Track M-Audio USB device.  It had like two inputs and a couple controls.