Dorico 4 getting glitchy as hell, at least for me

Twice now I have saved my work and turned off the project I was working on. And twice now, when trying to start again I have been presented with an error messaging saying that the project was not shut down properly and would I let Dorico recover it. Both times, when the file was “recovered” or “restored” (I don’t recall the precise term used by the error message), the file was a far earlier one, which has meant that I have been forced to reconstruct a couple of days of work.

I’m working on a Windows 10 machine that is pretty much dedicated to running Dorico, but, for whatever arcane reasons, it can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 – I don’t know if this is the problem.

I also have to say that, for me at least, inputting under Dorico 4 has been incredibly slow: each new note entered taking 4 or 5 seconds to register, and switching between Page View and Galley View takes 15 to 20 seconds.

Admittedly, I’m working on a large and somewhat complex project, but under Dorico 4 work just seems to be harder.

Playback is also really glitchy – and yes, I have adjusted the buffering as best as I understand how to do that.

The painful thing right now for me is having to reconstruct all the work I’ve done, and for the second time!

Hi, before the experts jump in, have you opened the task manager to see what other processes are going on? It sounds like some rogue background process could be hogging all your resources. Secondly, could it be that you’ve maxed out the RAM and Windows is paging from your C: drive, and maybe your hard drives are nearly full?

I have an ancient i7 with 32gb of RAM and Terabytes of SSDs which has no hope of ever running Win11, but it copes with Dorico very well.

I expect @Ulf will ask you to zip up a diagnostics file so he can examine it.

Dorico saves backup copies as you work, and when it quits, it deletes them. When it starts up again, if there are backup copies, it means that quitting didn’t happen properly, and the app probably quit unexpectedly.

When you get the dialog telling you that there are backup copies, it shows the time and date: you can compare this with your ‘normal’ saved project. If your project is later, then you can dismiss the dialog.

I don’t think that Windows 10 is responsible for the problem in question, but if you want to check why your machine can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 you can check it with WhyNotWin11. In most cases the TPM chip is missing or the existing CPU is not supported.

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Hi @SPH , if you are having glitchy playback, please run the free utility LatencyMon which you can download from here. Let’s see what that says.
And as Rob pointed out, it is also a good idea to post a Dorico diagnostics report (choose from Dorico’s menu Help > Create Diagnostics Report). Thanks

Thanks for that great tip @Juerg_Loeffler .
I just ran Why Not Win 11 on my Win10 computer and the only problem seems to be “TPM 1.2 Not supported”.

  1. Is this something I can update on my current hardware? (BIOS or something? or is it a chipset problem?)

  2. Would this be a problem for running Dorico under Win 11?

(I only bought this Dell tower about 3 years ago (when Win 10 was still supposed to be the “Last ever Windows version”) so this is a bit worrying.)

Windows 11 insists on TPM 2.0. It’s a chip on the mainboard, but it might be possible to upgrade from 1.2 to 2.0 via BIOS firmware. Google “Dell tpm 2.0 upgrade”.

you don’t need win 11 for Dorico so you’ll need to have some other reason for putting yourself through the pain of an OS upgrade… If you do want to upgrade, then your motherboard needs to be able to support TPM (Trusted Platform Module) technology to an acceptable level. If there is no mention of this in your system BIOS (there isn’t in mine), then it’s possible a BIOS upgrade may help. If you do see it in your BIOS then it may simply need to be switched on.