Sound drops out for split second every few minutes.....

I’ve got the bare minimum installed presently and I’ve done a number of the optimizations (after djones51 suggestions) and it’s still occurring. I’m beginning to suspect the unpowered USB hub that I have attached. Disconnecting and we’ll see.

EDIT:  Well, that wasn't it.   UGH. 

Thanks for the suggestions.  Last night I suffered a bout of frustration and took a more scorched earth approach:  I wiped the hard drive and did a clean install of Win10.  :-)  Now, I'm going to start listening and then adding stuff back in and see if there's something that causes it.  

I'll check out what was mentioned above too.  Thanks!

@djones51 - I didn't know about that (optimize for audio).  Will Google!

I found a program called LatencyMon.  Here's what it had to say:

CONCLUSION
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops. One or more ISR routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long. One problem may be related to power management, disable CPU throttling settings in Control Panel and BIOS setup. Check for BIOS updates.
LatencyMon has been analyzing your system for 0:01:29 (h:mm:ss) on all processors.

Did a BIOS update and that has definitely helped. Still getting higher latency but not as bad. Going to try some of the other steps now.

EDIT:  Doing a search for "Windows 10 latency" yielded a lot of good results.  

Updated all drivers and disabled pretty much every piece of hardware I don't use (Wimax, Wifi, etc.).

Latency looks better in LatencyMon presently.  Fingers crossed.

Awesome. Thanks!

Talked Keetakawee and installed Fidelizer.  Unfortunately, it didn't work.  Also tried different USB cable. 

Instead of throwing the laptop out the window I did a clean install of Windows 8.  Maybe the laptop isn't happy with Win10.  

Still in the process of updating everything......

@gdnrbob - It occurred with local files also so I don't think it was network related.  

After the Win8 clean install, the problem stopped.  I still had high latency but no more dropouts.  I'm thinking that the old laptop just wasn't happy with Win10 (likely some I/O driver issue).  

I think I solved the problem: I bought a new laptop.  :-)  
Should have it in a few weeks.  

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone!