Reply to latency, what to do what to do

Caution: Long post ahead, no really unless you patient,read the post heading and skip to the bottom.

So Ill start with hardware specs. I have a Focusrite Scarelette 2i2, yes its cheap yes its entry level. My main reson for purchasing it was because I had an Mbox, I was saving for a Stienberg UR824, and the day I decieded to take getting that interface seriously, the Mbox got pissed off and bombed out. Computer wise I have a Quad core AMD, 8gigs of RAM and a 7200rpm HDD that I run with Ableton.

Now to the problem. I was running a proj in Live with a few VST plug ins, and I was ready to arrange and record my plugins to wave from the clip to arrangement using an apc. At most I believe I had about 6 plugins each with their own audio tracks. Now when I play out the clips with out arming and recording I use up between 15 to 20 percent on the resource bar. But the moment I arm all the VST tracks and trigger the first clip, it all goes insane. There is even a delay on the APC's feed back lights. Its a real pain, so do I change my interface or do I up my computer?

Computer wise, I'm believeing Ill probably max out my RAM to 32gigs , in prep for 64bit Ableton 9 and to up my processor to and 8 core AMD.

But if I only need to better my interface, I'm again screwed. I still have not started saving up for a Interface. At this point I'm ready to spend between R3000 to R3500 +-