With the support of iLok, more tips & tricks from the community. Knut Richard Vanderloock contacted us and said…

In podcast 73, there was a question regarding Pro Tools 11 being unresponsive on Windows machines. As I have used Windows for ages, I have two suggestions for possible solutions on the problem. I don’t remember if he told us what kind of hard drive he was using, but the unresponsive waiting could be from a damaged sector on the drive or from a damaged file. If Windows is trying to read a damaged file or sector and having problems, it could be experienced as the computer “hanging” for several seconds. So, try another drive for your OS. The other culprit may be the memory. I have lost count of how many strange errors are related to faulty memory, memory compatibility problems or old BIOS firmware. Try upgrading the BIOS firmware, or removing and reallocating the memory modules. Remove all modules, and insert them back one by one; start with only one module and see if the problem is still there.  If not, remove and change the next module, and so on.

All good advice.  The Avid recommended tips and tweaks are designed to minimise this too.  Windows does do this occasionally when starting up applications where some apps would have a start up progress bar. Windows may appear to be hanging (sometimes evento the point of the GUI whiting out or saying the application is “not responding”), but it is not actually - it is actually processing in the background as usual but there is no graphical feedback to say so.

One of Windows 7’s and Windows 8’s best features is its ability to recover after apparent “hangs” so if it appears to have locked up or to not be responding, be patient and wait — 9 times out of 10 it will come good after a few minutes.

These kind of things rarely happen inside Pro Tools and I’ve only really seen them happen if you launch Pro Tools and then go back to the OS and start clicking around and browsing while Pro Tools is still booting.

The disable desktop composition tweak is a fine example of minimising this.

- Neil.