jaws running very sluggish on my new dell laptop

Hi Troy,
This may well be a specific JAWS issue, but I'm running JAWS on my Windows 11 laptop which has similar specs to yours and I haven't had any issues since I uninstalled all the bloatware.
If you haven't done this already, uninstall everything which isn't related to Office, soundcards, audio and print drivers. Get rid of any anti-virus stuff like Norton or whatever, Defender is perfectly sufficient for a home user. Stuff like Norton clogs up your system and makes things generally run slower. Make sure you get rid of Microsoft automated power manager, and go into the power, sleep and battery settings and make sure the power mode is set to 'best performance'. If you type 'power sleep and battery settings' into the search bar those settings will come up. On my HP laptop when I first got it, there was a program called 'HP star energy' or something like that. I got rid of that too, your Dell might have something similar. I knew it had nothing to do with drivers and so got rid of it. If you're not sure what something does just Google it. Make sure any sound enhancements are turned off too. Go to 'audio device manager', choose 'speaker' then the properties will come up. Tab til you find 'audio enhancements' or something similar and turn that off. On this HP laptop I'm using now, the enhancements weren't a massive deal, they were making my sound a little quieter, but I still turned them off anyway because I could hear the difference and it was bugging me. This may not help you at all. Sorry if it doesn't. This may well be an issue just specific to JAWS.

I’ve noticed this too lately, I don’t think it's a bloatware issue. For comparison I’ve got a few years old but still very solid Asus Zephyrus laptop with 16 GB ram and a top of the line mobile AMD processor from 2021, NVDA and narrator are as snappy as usual but Jaws often goes into sulky teenager not responding mode. It's weird because it only started happening a few weeks ago and it's not consistent other than Jaws takes longer to boot now. Like sometimes after it's decided to wake up it's as fast as it ever was but like there will be the odd situation where it just takes forever to respond to my commands. Then it will start up again as good as new just when I boot up NVDA, almost like it's jealous. I don’t know what to make of it.

I don't want to start anything but I'd recommend removing JAWS if you can.

As you said, it's huge and doesn't need to be that big, they could have it so you choose what you want to install when you run the installer, instead of installing all the crap you don't need.

Here's a webpage listing how to disable audio enhancements, it does use a microphone as an example but you can just use your speakers instead: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/topic/disable-audio-enhancements-0ec686c4-8d79-4588-b7e7-9287dd296f72

Curious as to which installer you are using? If you are using the standard installer from Freedom Scientific, you may want to try the offline installer instead. No guarantees, but might help the issue.

all I can really say is if NVDA is working fine just use it

While I would agree with the choice of Nvda over Jaws, there is a possibility the OP may be required to use Jaws for school, work, etc, and therefore needs it to actually work as intended. 🤷

I did say to the OP to use NVDA but their school might not allow them to download NVDA on to the computer, and they might not be able to bring their own one into the scool/work, places can be strange like that.

Enjoy~
https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html

Nvda has a really sweet add-on store built into the GUI. If you want some advice on add-ons, or have a particular need, you will likely find an add-on for it. :)

1. Press Insert+F2 to open the Run JAWS Manager dialog.
2. Select “Settings Center” and press Enter.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+D to ensure you are modifying the default settings.
4. In the Search edit box, type “Interrupt”.
5. Navigate to the “Interrupt speech with keyboard input” setting.
6. Uncheck this option to disable speech cutoff.

This should ensure that JAWS will not cut off speech when you type or use keyboard commands.

If you search for eloquence NVDA git hub on google you should find something that will make it sound more like the JAWS you're used to, if you need more hellp, feel free to mesage me on here.

Will they have to wait for any currently running speech to stop before they can listen to any feedback from commands or other input? If this is the case it is going to severely slow down their productivity. ☹