Originally Posted by: opus64 
I have a dedicated machine just to play the Syncron piano engine for live playing. It is a Windows 10 machine with i7-7500U cpu and SSD. I have disabled absolutely everything that is not needed to run the Syncron Piano to avoid cpu spikes interfering with playing. I originally had 16GB of RAM and could not reliably play more than 1 mic position, and even then once in a while it would crackle. I upgraded to 32GB RAM and it is better, I can play the "Intimate" Steinway D preset with very rare and subtle pop, which only uses 2 mic positions.
Some ideas. Last item is a great feature of the 7500U!
Do you have a good audio interface with good ASIO drivers (e.g. RME)?
You could try increasing the ASIO buffer size to 128 or 256 or 512 to reduce popping. This gets to the point of long latency and unplayable but see if that helps.
I don't remember what rate the samples are recorded but make sure you are at that same rate (I assume 44.1KHz but check!)
Turn off wifi and bluetooth. Fully turn off all antivirus (not just toggle from settings so research that) which is easier to do witn Win10 Pro. See if this helps.
Try some power tweaks (Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options HIGH PERFORMANCE)
You also want to use a nvme SSD in your m.2 slot. There are slower SATA SSDs that are also m.2 format. The newer generation nvme SSDs are much faster than the older ones and not so expensive. Samsung is a good bet but several other brands have effectively caught up. NVME drives typically thermal throttle so on my laptop there is a thermal pad which connects to the metal case for heatsinking. Not sure how that is done on your ThinkPad or if it is possible. Regardless, move up from SATA SSD may not make much of a difference so I wouldn't run out to buy a new nvme drive at this point.
Try some BIOS tweaks (disable Intel SpeedStep, disable c-states (if possible). This may lower max speeds of CPU but reduce dropouts.
Alternative approaches to CPU. The 7500U is an excellent CPU that you may be able to boost a bit in performance depending on how much Lenovo locked it down. You can research that.
--I would try enabling SpeedShift with EPP=0 (via free ThrottleStop software)
--The developer of ThrottleStop got his Lenovo 7500U to run at 3.5MHz on all cores and unlocked from 15watts to 28watts. Below link shows his steps with some registry tweaks (new version of ThrottleStop does not require these registry tweaks as there is a "Disable and Lock Turbo Power Limits" checkbox. You still will need to study this a bit and to get the checkbox to work requires 5 minutes of setup discussed in the thread).
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/the-throttlestop-guide.531329/page-563#post-10478523