Latency
Music on my laptop is occasionally interrupted.
A simple first step is to check the latency of the system by running LatencyMon
The DPC latency problem
Windows is not a real time operating system. All requests to the operating system are delivered on a best effort basis. There are no guarantees whatsoever that requests are delivered within a certain time frame, which are the characteristics of a real-time operating system. That is not a problem for most devices and tasks but this is bad news for audio applications (which are considered soft real-time) because they need to deliver data to the subsystem and the hardware in buffers several times per second. If one or more buffers miss their deadlines and are not delivered in time it has audible consequences which are recognized as dropouts, clicks and pops.
Source: Resplendence
DPC=Deferred Procedure Call
I use the LatencyMon.
Power saving
CPU is set to 100% when plugged in.
Couldn't find any option in the BIOS
Network
There is button on the laptop to disable all WiFi but it shuts down the Bluetooth as well.
Bluetooth is what I am using to listen to the audio.
You can disable the WiFI adapter in the device manager.
Latency still remaines high.
Of course I can disable the LAN as well but my audio is on a NAS!
Pagefaults
msmpeng.exe, the MS antimaleware is the only one generating the pagefaults.
Disabling it on an internet connected PC is not an option.
Beside 300 page faults is not very spectacular.
Drivers
The NVIDIA driver slows things down.
Disabling my screen is not an option
This is a laptop with a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU M 620 @ 2.67GHz
The ultimate paradox, tremendous CPU power and still having dropouts.
Note that if high latencies have been reported to be caused by drivers which are critical for the operation of your computer such as motherboard drivers, there may be nothing you can do to get your computer suitable for processing real time audio.