Right? I'm no newcomer to computer mechanics myself, but it really does work this way. As a matter of fact it was one of the "Win 7 optimizing" strategies the soundcards makers have on their website, which I had followed earlier, but without the diagnostic tool, I wasn't aware of the impact this particular advice had. In essence, I had tried so many different things, I assumed this would have, if any little to no effect on my situation, as I imagine you would as well. I need to read a bit more on how power savings settings impact how the computer and OS runs programs. As I noted before, I simply assumed that the Balanced configuration would simply throttle down if there was no usage on the processor, whereas the High Performance setting would keep the engine running full throttle, fans running hot and such. But I guess I was wrong! Anywho, I'm attaching a screenshot showing the dramatic difference turning it on and off has. The yellow and red bars show high latency which interrupts and causes the proc to compensate, I'm assuming. the green bars means all is cool, no issues. You'll see a steady stream of green then, when I switch the power profile, it shows higher and more dramatic issues. Mind you, I'm doing simple things, downloading some music, and of course responding here. Amazing. The tool is DPC Latency Checker from
here.