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Screen reader growling today

SusanB-M1

Incurable Optimist
SusanB-M1
Joined
Jul 17, 2006
Messages
3,766
Today my screen reader ('synthetic Dave'!!) which I think is SAM on Dolphin Supernova keeps sounding as if it has a frog in its throat and is making growling sounds here and there. Any computer experts there who might have an idea why? I've written an e-mail to Dolphin Support, but I shall not get a reply until tomorrow afternoon.

Any advice gratefully received.
 
SusanB-M1 said:
Today my screen reader ('synthetic Dave'!!) which I think is SAM on Dolphin Supernova keeps sounding as if it has a frog in its throat and is making growling sounds here and there. Any computer experts there who might have an idea why? I've written an e-mail to Dolphin Support, but I shall not get a reply until tomorrow afternoon.

Any advice gratefully received.
Click to expand...
The voice synthesizers i am familiar with are all strictly software and run on your PC CPU. If you have a heavy load on your CPU, you could get the kind of thing you mention.

I would try the following:
1. Reboot (standard Windows trouble shooting procedure.)
2. Check to see if any process is hogging the CPU.
3. Update you AV software and run a full scan to be sure there's no nastiness hogging your CPU.

Is it possible you are running a CPU intensive task?
 
Many thanks. I did try re-starting, but I will run a scan now. I am not sure what a CPU intensive task is, but I do not think so, because I use only personal correspondence, e-mails, this and BBC MBs, and tend to delete anything else which I might store temporarily. On Friday I ran an Ad-Aware scan, which I do occasionally, and I don't think I clicked on anything which might be running still.

I'll see what happens.
 
Well, another thank you - that seems to have done the trick! I use Norton AV, so I clicked on the 'check for updates' and then ran the scan. At the end of that there were only 0's on the 'removed', 'quarantined' etc lines, but I am listening to the voice as I'm typing this and it is functioning properly.
 
SusanB-M1 said:
Well, another thank you - that seems to have done the trick! I use Norton AV, so I clicked on the 'check for updates' and then ran the scan. At the end of that there were only 0's on the 'removed', 'quarantined' etc lines, but I am listening to the voice as I'm typing this and it is functioning properly.
Click to expand...
The bolding marks your problem. Norton AV is one of the pokiest, most CPU hogging AV programs out there.
 
Susan I think what Mort means is that Norton AV may have been running a background scan which you were unaware of. Because a lot of Central Processor Unit (CPU) cycles were being required to run the scan, other applications which required CPU time, but were being given lower priority, ran slower than normal, which caused the growling voice synthesiser.

If I'm wrong he will doubtless correct me. The problem could presumably be stopped by configuring Norton to run scans only on command- ie when you are not using the machine for anything else.
 
Soapy Sam said:
Susan I think what Mort means is that Norton AV may have been running a background scan which you were unaware of. Because a lot of Central Processor Unit (CPU) cycles were being required to run the scan, other applications which required CPU time, but were being given lower priority, ran slower than normal, which caused the growling voice synthesiser.

If I'm wrong he will doubtless correct me. The problem could presumably be stopped by configuring Norton to run scans only on command- ie when you are not using the machine for anything else.
Click to expand...
Sort of. Norton also displays a bad tendency to hang up and cause problems while doing a normal scan on file open - and at other randowm intervals just for the hell of it. Sometimes a reboot doesn't help, but then (as this time) the update slaps Norton up side the head and makes it fly right.

I don't like NAV - not all.
 
MortFurd, Soapy Sam and Zep

Thank you all for your info, much appreciated. The NAV is set to scan once a week and I go and do something else while it is running. I will follow that other link in a minute. Earlier this year I bought a new computer with Windows XP and Dolphin transferred everything from the old one. The NAV (new one)came as part of the package.

(The voice has been behaving itself today!)
 
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