Support and Troubleshooting — Windows Edition

Praepara Health needs the Microsoft .NET 8 Desktop Runtime, and Windows does not install it for you. If it is missing, the app will not launch and Windows usually offers a download link. You can also get it directly from Microsoft at dotnet.microsoft.com — choose the .NET Desktop Runtime for Windows x64. It is free, takes about a minute, and once installed the app opens normally. Your data is untouched by this; nothing was lost.

That is expected. When the Privacy Policy or Terms change in a way that affects what you agreed to, Praepara asks you to review and accept the current version once. Version 1.0.4 updated both documents, so everyone sees that screen a single time on first launch. Accepting does not reset anything — every record you have logged is exactly where you left it.

Because a healthy range is different for different people, and the app has no way to know yours. A clinician may want someone with COPD to sit at 88–92% oxygen saturation, and a trained athlete’s resting heart rate can be near 48 bpm — figures a built-in range would flag as problems. From version 1.0.4, Praepara ships with no built-in idea of normal. If your care team gave you a target range, open that tracker, choose Set my range, and enter it; the app will then tell you whether a reading falls inside or outside the range you entered. If you leave it blank, your reading is simply recorded. What your numbers mean is a conversation for you and your care team.

Try these in order:

1. Make sure Windows is fully up to date (Settings → Windows Update) — the app relies on the Windows App SDK, which ships through Windows Update.
2. Fully close the app (check Task Manager for a lingering PraeparaHealth process) and relaunch it from the Start menu rather than an older pinned shortcut.
3. From the Microsoft Store, open your Library, find Praepara Health Suite, and choose “Update” (or uninstall and reinstall) to get the latest build.
4. Restart your PC — this clears any stuck background process holding a lock on your local database.

Still stuck? Email us (see below) with your Windows version (Settings → System → About) and roughly when it started happening.

No account and no cost — Praepara Health Suite is completely free, with no subscription, in-app purchase, or premium tier of any kind. The app uses your existing signed-in Windows user account as its unlock boundary, so there’s nothing separate to sign up for.

The optional in-app PIN is a second layer on top of your Windows account, and it locks with escalating wait times after repeated wrong attempts — this is intentional and can’t be bypassed by us. If you’re currently locked out:

1. Wait out the lockout timer shown on screen — it increases with each failed attempt, but does eventually clear.
2. Once unlocked, go to Security Settings and either change your PIN or turn it off if you don’t want to use one.

Your underlying data isn’t at risk from a PIN lockout — the PIN only gates the app’s UI, and your Windows account is still what actually protects the encrypted database (see Section 7 of the Terms & Privacy Policy).

This is expected, not a bug. Each profile’s encryption key is tied to your specific Windows user account on that specific device — it isn’t portable between accounts or machines by design, and there’s no biometric or cloud-account fallback. If you enabled cloud backup before losing access to your old Windows account, you can restore from that backup on the new PC. If you didn’t, that profile’s data can’t be recovered — not by you, not by us.

That’s expected — each profile (yourself, a child, someone you care for) has its own completely separate, independently encrypted database. Nothing is shared between profiles automatically. Use the profile switcher in the sidebar to confirm which profile is currently active; your other profile’s data is still there, just not visible until you switch back to it.

Not currently — profiles are intentionally isolated from each other for privacy, so there’s no built-in merge or copy tool. If you created a duplicate profile by mistake, you can delete the unwanted one from the profile switcher; just double-check you’re deleting the empty one, not the one with your real data.

A few things to check:

• Confirm the disc actually shows up as a drive in File Explorer first — if Windows itself can’t see it, the app can’t either. Try a different disc drive if you have one, or check the disc for visible scratches.
• Some discs use a DICOMDIR index file at the root, which the app reads automatically; others are just a folder of loose .dcm files with no index. Try pointing the import at the specific folder containing the .dcm files if the automatic DICOMDIR detection doesn’t find anything.
• If the disc has autorun software from the imaging center (a built-in viewer app), that software is separate from Praepara — you don’t need to install it. Import directly from the disc’s raw files.

The app doesn’t mount ISO disc images — only physical/mounted discs that Windows already shows as a folder.

Try adjusting the window/level slider in the viewer first — different scan types (CT vs. X-ray vs. MRI) often need very different windowing to look right, and the default may not suit every study. If it still looks wrong after adjusting, try the “Open in external viewer” option (e.g. MicroDicom) to rule out an issue specific to Praepara’s renderer. Remember: the built-in viewer is for personal reference only, never for diagnosis — always rely on your radiologist’s official reading.

Cloud backup writes encrypted files into a local folder that your own cloud provider’s desktop app (OneDrive, Google Drive, Proton Drive, or Dropbox) already keeps synced — Praepara Health Suite doesn’t talk to any cloud provider’s servers directly.

If it looks stale, check that your cloud provider’s sync app is running and signed in, that it shows the target folder as up to date (not paused or in an error state), and that the App’s own Settings still point to a folder your cloud app is actually syncing.

All exports are generated entirely on your device. If a file won’t open, check that it finished writing — a very small file size (a few KB) usually means the export was interrupted, often by low disk space. Re-run the export, and make sure you have a PDF reader installed, or open it in any modern web browser.