Any setting of 441 or less should be good, i.e., 10ms or less. This is good for any instrument including a 'naked piano'. A setting of 441 should not be to hard on a CPU. I run mine at 128 (3ms) with no problems.

Rikki one would think a new laptop should easily beable to achieve good results with a setting of 441 samples per channel or less. When you say your laptop is a duo do you mean a dual processor. If so most software is not able to take advantage of this and may even react badly to it....especialy host and sampler software. You should beable to turn this feature off including hyper threading.