I am having a weird issue where jaws2024 the latest build is running very pourly on my new windows laptop running windows11 home and hoping someone can help because so far vispero has not been much help, surprise surprise!
I have the latest build of jaws2024 and this problem is mainly happening with eliquence. Using eliquence jaws is cutting in and out badly, in fact so bad I can hardly use my laptop. The weird thing is when I switch to another synthesizer jaws will run better but still not the greatest but at least I can use my laptop.
Here are my laptop specks:
dell inspiron
windows11 home
16 gb of ram
1 tb ssd
intel celeron processor
Here's what I've tried so far:
ran a jaws repair
uninstalled and reinstalled jaws twice including removing everything
checked to see if all drivers including sound drivers are up-to-date and they are, this included drivers on both the dell side and the microsoft side
disabled unwanted programs at startup
Here's another odd thing. I also tried both narator and NVDA and both run on my system just fine so the problem has got to be within jaws itself but I just can't figure it out.
A little side rant jaws is a resource hog and vispero refuses to do anything about it which leads to my theary that it's a jaws issue since other screen readers work just fine. I mean on my system jaws is a 1.99 gb program which is a little bit much for a screen reader. I have more than enough ram and memmory so I don't know what the problem is other than vispero continues to add new features and not fixing the bugs and everyone talks bad about voiceover? I think jaws is worse.
Any other suggestions I can try?
Thanks,
Troy
Comments
uninstall all the bloatware on your system
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.
Also happening to me on a solid machine
Iāve noticed this too lately, I donāt think it's a bloatware issue. For comparison Iāve 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 donāt know what to make of it.
Disable audio enhancements.
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
Thanks all I will checkā¦
Thanks all I will check those settings.
I agree. Jaws gets worse and worse with every update. Of course vispero blames these issues on everything but themselves. I'm tired of forking out money for their crap.
I'm sad that windows10 is going away in 2025 because jaws runs fine on my windows10 desktop. If I have to use windows11 they better find out why jaws runs like a bag of crap.
An idea
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.
Just use NVDA
all I can really say is if NVDA is working fine just use it
Situations and Limitations
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. š¤·
I agree with @brian
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.
I would use NVDA more but Iā¦
I would use NVDA more but I don't know much about it to use it as my primary screen reader.
NVDA v2024 Guide
Enjoy~
https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html
Add-on Store
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. :)
try disabling speech cut off
1. Press Insert+F2 to open the Run JAWS Manager dialog.
2. Select āSettings Centerā and press Enter.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+D to ensure you are modifying the default settings.
4. In the Search edit box, type āInterruptā.
5. Navigate to the āInterrupt speech with keyboard inputā 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.
@troy
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.
@Bhavik
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. ā¹