Laptop USB audio woes

Alright, I've got an asus G51Jx, and it's USB sucks. With my audio 2 DJ I'll have to use the "medium latency" setting to avoid any shear drop outs, and I still get a little click every once and a while. For comparison, my desktop (which is a good bit slower) will run fine on low latency. I've basically narrowed it down to either the USB on the laptop or the fact that my laptop is running win7 instead of XP, but since I am completely unable to install XP on it, I'm left with fixing the USB. I tried getting a expresscard (vantec 3.0 card) and it's basically useless with my audio 2. It's choppy at the maximum latency settings and just gets worse as you go down.

The only thing I can think of unless I somehow get the USB to start being competent is to use this itty bitty firewire port on the side instead, but an audiofire 2 would probably be 120-140 after selling my audio 2.

In the device manager, disable wifi, CDROM, modem, bluetooth and try again. report back with performance.

What other USB devices/Hubs do you have attached?

It won't be Windows 7 - I can almost guarantee that. Also, don't rush into shelling out cash on extra hardware - it's likely just OS tweaking that's needed.

Deep breath is a good start :)

Alright, here's what all I disabled:

)Two "high definition audio controller"s. Onboard sound I'm guessing, not sure why there was two.
)"SDA standard host controller', or the SD slot in the front.
)Wireless adapter
)Web cam
)Memory stick host controller, this might be related to the SD slot
)xD picture card host controller, same
)CD drive

And with ableton+reason playing some loops and traktor open with 4 decks with 4 FX and key change, all being run at 96khz and minimal latency, I didn't hear a single drop out. I'm gonna try enabling some stuff to see if it was a single thing that caused all the problems. I have another install that I'll have to try as well, whatever is causing the problem is PnP with win7.

EDIT: oh, with that test I had my external and my midi adapter hooked up with the sound card. I need to hunt down another cable to use with my VCI and hook it up as well.

EDIT 2: I went back and enabled everything and it still worked fine. Then I opened foobar2k and tried to play something and it all fell apart. Closed it, changed audio settings in ableton to low and right back to minimal and it works fine. Still trying to figure out exactly what the problem is.

Run this bad boy while you use your musical stuff.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml