Good idea Tony. I actually updated all the laptop's drivers already with the most recent I could find online. (with the exception of the vid card drivers, which I seem to have forgotten about ) That is actually searching online and not using the Asus website because those don't get updated after a certain period of time. So I'm certain all the drivers on the laptop now are the most recent available.
I've already updated the chipset driver (Intel), audio driver (Realtek), LAN driver (atheros), Wifi Driver (atheros), Bluetooth driver (atheros), USB driver (Intel), touchpad driver and the cardreader driver.

As said, the only thing I didn't upgrade yet was the video card driver. This model actually uses two chipsets: and Intel 4000 (for mild desktop work, enough for my uses) and some nVidia Gforce chipset (for games - which I don't play). I'll update those as well, I don't know why I overlooked them in the first place. Thanks for the tip!

Traktor also advises to use ASIO drivers for the soundcard, but Realtek doesn't have those. I know there's always the Asio4all project, but that's still in beta and I'd hate to use beta drivers on this PC.

You'd think 1.8 Ghz would be enough, wouldn't you? I'd thought so too, but it seems this is not the case, the LatencyMon program (which is not by Traktor themselves, so it's from an unsuspected source), clearly proves that. It seems Traktor is a very demanding application. It can use up to four audio streams simultaneously, and add a bunch of effects on top of that, and this makes for a very resource-hungry program.