One Week with Windows: A Mac User's Adventure

Hi Justin,
When you said 'caffeine' I thought you were going to tell us you had decided to go for a well-earned coffee break! Wouldn't have blamed you if you had! I've never heard of this Caffeine app but it does sound cool. Thanks for the recommendation.

Yes, it does work nicely!!! I tested it, and when active, the computer did not sleep. I like that it is super easy to manage, and doesn't have some crazy interface that NVDA can't handle. As far as a coffee break, that doesn't sound bad either. 😊👍

Hey, I did indeed follow this guide, looked, made super extra sure those were disabled. It's. Still. Happening. Soooo weird. 😢🙄

Oops, I thought you were referring to the macOS Terminal command "Caffeinate". I was super excited when you mentioned a Windows version. Went back and re-read your post and realized my error. 😳

It's all good. :) Result would be the same nonetheless.
Just got off the phone with Dell support. Doesn't seem that the issue with the audio was completely resolved. The guy had never seen this one before, though it wasn't something big enough where he could pick up the differences over the phone. He did help me get Dell Optimizer installed and a few other software packages updated since the Dell support assist utility wasn't giving me the option. It was telling me there were two updates available but not giving me the option to install. Not sure what he did, guessing NVDA just wasn't picking up the link or button. But everything is installed and up to date.

Hopefully things will be smoother now that you have those updates. 😀

If you can deal with this laptop for now that's great but personally I'd recommend going with lenovo as I find their app to be accessible, at least it was the last time I tried it.

HP isn't bad iether.

I'd recommend looking into your sound drivers.

press windows plus x, then arrow down until you hear device manager and press enter. You'll now be in a treview, press tab and then down arrow until you hear audio inputs and outputs and right arrow to open it.

Arrow down to speakers, and press your applocations key and arrow down to update driver and press enter.

tab to brows my computer and press enter and then tab to let me pick from a list of drivers and press enter/space, a box will now appear with your audio drivers, arrow down to one of them, press enter and that should be it but if not tab to an ok button.

Doing this might restart your computer and if it doesn't I'd recommend doing it anyway just to see what happens to the sound, if it's still sounding stuttery and crackly then I'd recommend trying it again with another sound driver, follow the instructions above and pick a diffirent driver in the box at the end, and if you've tried all that with no result and can't handle it, i'd recommend getting iether an hp or lenovo.

I think I found a few culprits, the Waves Max Audio Service, and sound enhancements for the built in microphone. They are, shall we say, being held for further questioning. Sneaky, the waves service wasn't coming up on the installed programs list at all. But found it in startup apps, disabled, also went to the list of services and disabled it there. And for the mic, I had turned off enhancements for the speakers, but not for the mic, but Dell is supposed to have some kind of fancy feature where it optimizes audio for recordings based on the type of place you are in, so that could have something to do with it.
If the problem persists, these culprits will be released and the investigation will continue.

I said this before. I will say it again. I miss Microsoft Signature Edition PCs. God, those were nice~ 😍

So, this morning, I woke up, got ready for my program, plugged in the usb hub, plugged in the headphone cable I use exclusively for NVDA, since I have a device that gives me several inputs and lets me control them individually and output to one set of headphones. Anyway, the headphone jack was showing that nothing was connected. I couldn't go on air this morning, but did some troubleshooting, and finally uninstalled the "update" the Dell guy installed last night, thus forcing Windows to revert to a different version of that driver, and now, headphone audio works again, and also no insane lowering and raising of the volume. 🙌🙌🎆🎊🥳🙌

I never had the chance to get my hands on one of those, so don't know what I'm missing. But this dell is fantastic!

Hey Justin,

Kudos on getting things situated on your new laptop. Isn't it nice not getting an 'SNR' every 3 and a half seconds? 😀

Oh yes! Yes indeed! lol Took me a second to remember what SNR was, but then I remembered Safari. lol I never had it as bad as most, but I'd take Chrome on this Dell over Safari any day.
So, on the issue of audio, I thought I had it fixed when I restarted, and audio came through the headphones. Removed them, plugged in again, and no go. I fought most of the day trying to figure it out. Tried several different drivers, nothing. Nada. If I restarted with the cable plugged in, audio went to the headphones. But after they were removed, then if you would plug them back in, it would not register. At all. I will trouble shoot things by myself normally. I don't bug tech support over every little thing. But, this thing, even though I bought it on Ebay, still has a support plan until like 2026, so I decided to take advantage of it. The support guy was just as stumped as I was, as he had never seen that, but after trying to reinstall the realtek driver, seeing the same thing, he ran some command line magic, scans of some sort you can't do otherwise, and had Windows repair itself. Restarted, and problem solved. We then proceeded to do several plug, unplug, plug, unplug, restart and repeat cycles. This time it does look like we got it fixed. So, here's to a smooth broadcast tomorrow. In addition to my headphone jack working again, crazy audio volume issues also seem to have been resolved. Fingers crossed. God bless Dell tech support!

Command Line Interface is powerful, and a lifesaver sometimes. True story.

I have a pair of Creative Labs Pebble desktop stereo speakers. had them for years, and used to use them on my MBP, because those speakers were terri-bad. They use USB for power and a 3.5mm jack for audio. They sound nice, of course, but I only use them when I want to play a movie on my HP. 🤷

Having said that, I have heard that Realtek cards are known to have issues with sound instability. I have a Realtek card, but so far have not experienced any sound issues.

Here's to knocking on wood. . . .

Oh man, yeah that was super frustrating, but I did a few more tests even after I got off the phone with tech support, and looks like it is indeed good to go this time. Just plugged in for my show this morning, and everything is working as expected.

I imagine losing sound, even a little, for us is like having your display randomly cut out for a sighted person. 😩

just to let you know that for reading book you can use Bookworm, this is an opensource software made for visual impaired.
https://getbookworm.com/

For audiobooks instead, you have:
1. Balabolka:
https://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

2. Biblos:
https://www.digrande.it/en/Biblos.aspx

Hi,
The Bookworm website doesn't work for me, and I'm assuming it doesn't work for everybody else either. Somebody sent me this link a few weeks ago, and I eventually tried it a couple of days ago but no luck. It kept taking me to a completely diferent domain after I had to go into Brave's settings and enable the site after it was telling me it wasn't safe. I joined their Telegram group, but they didn't give me an answer about the website even though I asked. Instead they gave me a page with the latest version, like a file sharing thing. Here it is for those who want it.
https://x0box.xyz/uploads/bookworm/
Their GitHub is here. https://github.com/blindpandas/bookworm
The link to the Telegram group is under the 'resources' section. If someone could give me a straight answer about the site that would be good. Maybe Simone you know since you posted it here? Is it even working for you? I get the impression that people in that group, English isn't their first language so they didn't understand my question clearly. I even offered to donate something to help them get their site up and running again, but no answer to that. It's such a shame there isn't a website since this is a good program. I like the fact it supports so many file formats, and the epub support is great. I didn't post it here originally because of their not being a site.