Category: Geeks r Us
My computer is suddenly losing sound at times. It's not just jaws but the whole sound goes out. The weird thing is it mostly happens when I'm coming out of forms mode in internet explorer. I'm using winxp. Any suggestions? Thanks.
Troy
Do you kno if its just loosing sound or if its freezing?
As far as a blind persons concerned it could just be loosing sound, but as far as they kno it could be freezing on top of that.
Which ever answer you give will yeald different results from us
BEN.
Troy,
When your sound 'goes out,' does it return without requiring you to reboot? Are you able to determine if it's merely sound you're losing? If so, you might try killing windows explorer (explorer.exe) from the windows task manager (control+alt+delete). Strange as this sounds, it's fixed the problem on the rare occasions this has happened to me.
Now, if that doesn't work... Your master volume could've been muted. I've seen this a few times (mostly with machines running realTech sound cards). Type 'sndvol32' from the 'run' dialog, wait a few seconds to insure the program has gained focus, and press alt+M. If that doesn't work, press again to undo what you've done. Alternatively, you could just start a space/tab cycle until you find speech, but if you're unsuccessful, and your memory for tab orders is less than eidetic, you may hurt more than you've sought to help.
jim i've sceen this before on machines that have conflicts based on which irq's things get given
good lord! IRQ's don't matter all that much any more. Unless the device in question has dip switches on it, no need to worry about all that.
I also have Windows XP, and I've been having that problem as well, where I be doing something and either JAWS stops working, or the majority of sounds disappear. I mean, both those situations have and sometimes do happen to me. They don't happen now as often as they used to, but yeah. For the JAWS situation (I use JAWS 7.0), I am able to just shut down and/or restart JAWS, but then (say if I was reading a webpage), it won't read it, like it won't talk and will sometimes take a long time if anything to read the title of another Window when I switch out of the Internet one. (I don't know if this also has to do with XP or just JAWS so that's why I put this situation in.) When restarting JAWS doesn't work, I just restart my computer because I don't know how to fix that. I also do that for the disappearing sounds problem, but thank y'all for explaining and giving solutions to that sounds issue.
I've had this happen to me before on my PC because it has a Realteck AC97 audio sound card and no other computer I've used before does it. You can also lose things like JAWS if and when you use a program such as Real Player with those sound cards as well. I'd also suggest going in to the start menu, typing sndvol32, then just going round the tabs and spaces cycle till you get all your speech and sounds back again.
I'm wondering if you are losing sound, or losing jaws. Usually, the loss of jaws is preceeded by an ominous bing sound. You can also check if you have sound by invoking narrator. Sometimes, if you tab around the open programs cycle, you will see a little dialog from jaws that says "jaws has to shut down, click okay". You can't restart jaws until this dialog is dismissed.
If you are indeed losing sound then you are probably shit out of luck unless you have enough sight to check what's still active on your screen, or you have a willing mate to read it for you.
Bob
this has just happened to me, and i still have no sound. we have check it out, and all seems to be in order in terms of the sound card. will try out the master control as above though.
well the sndvol32 work for me. i think it was the cd volume that had been taken down to 0. still not sure why yet. thanks guys for that.
Sometimes, I lose JAWS when I look at video clips. I don't know why it does it, but when it does, I get a little bing noise after I close the site, and JAWS is completely gone. so, I end up having to restart my computer. I know that it's JAWS I'm losing, because one time when it happened, I had my boyfriend read the screen to me. I forget the exact words it read, but it had something to do with JAWS.
Gemini,
It was most likely an error report which can be dismissed by pressing alt+d. If you have sounds set to play when processes/programs are closed, you'll get a sense of whether you're pressing keys in the correct window. Alternatively:
Oh okay, thanks. It only does it every once in a while, not every time I watch a clip. It's weird. But thanks. I'll try that.
if you use jfw 8, you can press jaws key plus windows plus f4. this will kill all jfw related processes, and you can then restart jaws.