Italo, Nick thanks again for your suggestions.
Installing XP was the first thing that I tried when I got my laptop. It's a Sony Vaio VGN-AW21Z/B (the one that appears in the Casino Royale movie, haha..!) but unfortunately Sony doesn't give any downgrades to XP. So, for the past 30 days I have been doing nothing else other than installing drivers and running setups and searching things in the Internet.
The major problem was that I couldn't find any drivers for my graphics card… 🙁 So, it had to be Vista… So, another option was to sell the RMEs and get a Prism Sound Orpheus which supposedly works in Vista but users have reported full blast volumes and unusual behavior. Prism says these have been fixed but who knows…?
The Mac was a definite alternative, but the new ones have a problematic firewire chip from Agere (whereas previous ones were from Texas Instruments, I think) – the Sony's FW chipset is from Ricoh and it works pretty well.
Nick, in the Dice application for latency, it's either left blank or it returns an error message… :-/
Regards,
Yannis