OK SOLVED!
Don’t know what it was but
- Uninstalled Shotcut
- Delete All Shotcut folders in C:\Program Files
- Search for any traces of Shotcut in registry and deleted
- Restart Laptop
- Re-downloaded + Re-intsalled Shotcut
- Set Proxy On + Preview scaling to 360p
- Shotcut starts transcoding clip to H264 360p
- Restart Shotcut because it warns you to after turning on proxy
- Proxy preview clip now plays smoothly
- Can’t avoid a bit of wasted time transcoding but this is it or a get a new laptop.
- YAY! I can wait to buy that 128GB RAM, 128-core/256-thread AMD Mobile Ryzen 5900H CPU + Nvidia RTX 3090 video chip laptop.
Shotcut is the best editor ever now. I’d say Shotcut is better than Resolve for beginners and lite-users as it incorporates hardware encoding at no cost. The free version of Resolve only has software encoding. You have to pony up $300 to get Resolve Studio that gives you hardware encoding and additional collaboration ability.
Thanks all for your responses and help.