I've asked about this before and now it's gotten worse. Hopefully someone will have some insight.

I don't know if this is a general Windows thing or something with Dragon but it's taking longer (30 seconds plus) for recognitions to complete. Nothing's changed the system. I haven't added anything new for a while.

If I start the machine up and use one or two applications, it's not bad but as soon as I get to my normal workload (five or six browser windows chrome and Firefox, 20 tabs in each browser window, at least two windows of Word or Excel, half a dozen wsl Windows and 1/2 a dozen tech tools. You'd think with this load, I would see resource starvation but I usually still have 10 GB out of 32 remaining and CPU utilization rarely goes above 20-30%. Hence my conjecture that it's resource contention and not starvation. Turning off all the applications doesn't change the lag once it occurred.

I haven't been able to upgrade browser add-ons. It's the usual problem. The add-on for Firefox has vanished, chrome keeps saying it's not enabled and takes in uninstall/reinstall of the extension to make it work again, and edge tries to install an add-on that is not compatible with 15.6.

I do have stalling/stuttering with applications in general but it's more the 5 to 15 second range. The only time I've seen this kind of pausing in other systems is when a disk drive is going bad and it's retrying. According to CrystalDiskInfo my Samsung 860 QVO is still 96% good.

I have disabled antivirus much to the dismay of my MSP and no change.

It is painful enough that I am considering reinstalling my entire Windows environment.

 

These are just my thoughts; I am not making claims that these are specific solutions.

You will always see about half your memory (10GB you say) "free" or "used" because the RAM allocation algorithm always splits memory that way. I'm dead sure that it is not a RAM capacity problem.

A steady 20% to 30% CPU load is a strong indicator that Dragon is repeatedly trying to do something in a low-level loop or interrupt cycle. No normal computer runs with that load unless a program is doing heavy computation. So it is definitely not a CPU capacity problem.

I run a similar (or greater) load of apps and browser tabs (usually only one browser) and Word documents and Office files, and rarely exceed 3% or so CPU load in the task manager (unless heavy computation is going on somewhere). So I do not think it is an application load problem.

The only time things like this go wrong with Dragon is when it is trying to do something low level in a loop. I've seen it happen with microphone issues when I'm swapping microphones, or if I start Dragon with no valid microphone, etc. Someone else on the forum recently went through the effort of learning to use ProcMon to hunt down his problem.

Oh yes, and one final thought/recommendation. I could *never* get 15.61 to work properly on my two Win10 Win11 machines. It was a disaster, constantly hanging (including in the ways you describe). I punted it after a couple of days of trying and went back to 15.3, and I have been happy ever since. Downgrading to 15.3 is my first recommendation for you.

Using Lunis' trick of creating an Admin account and running Dragon with Administrator privileges to enable Dragon to do registry operations may help. That's my second recommendation.

Finally, learning ProcMon so that you can track down the loop interaction is my third recommendation for you.

I would not reinstall Windows totally unless you really, really need to. That will be a waste of your time, I think. (Unless you were clever enough to take backup snapshots of your disks to make "reinstall" operations more like "restore" operations.

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.