Hello everyone.
As I mentioned in my first post here, I've been trying to perform some
operations on my system to make it run a little better. I found recently
that I couldn't defragment the hard disk and it was suggested to me that
this might be because there are errors on the drive. I ran chkdsk but it
won't fix anything because it says the drive "can't be unlocked" as it's
being used by another process. I turned off just about every process I could
think of that was nonessential, including jaws, and still get the same
message. I've set it to schedule the chkdsk on restart, but I have a feeling
it isn't doing anything, as when I run the programme again from the command
line later it says it still finds errors. I'm also a little confused because
it says it's supposed to create a log file, yet I can't find it anywhere. I
even tried saving to a textfile with a command like the following:
chkdsk /f c: > c:\chkreport.txt
However, this doesn't work because the "recovery" scan only happens upon
restart, and the stupid programme does not seem to create any kind of log
file on its own. I did look in event viewer, and I see nothing. When I run
the programme without the /f switch, it claims to find errors that it needs
the /f switch to fix, even after the scheduled chkdsk after restart.
Which brings me to a question that's been nagging at me for ages. How do the
rest of you who use screenreaders and want to perform checks and maintenance
on their system go about it? I'd love to run my antivirus, defragmenter,
disk checker, etc in safe mode, but I can't even get speech access there.
Can't use the recovery console, can't access the bios (yeah, I know that's
always been a no-go for screenreader users).
But I'm wondering if there might be some neat third-party applications that
could help out here? For example, what I was thinking of was perhaps a step
by step task scheduler with some audio feedback (even some tones or
something), which would terminate when a problem was found, generating a
log which you could then view when you have speech up and running after a
normal restart, assuming of course that you can even get the system to
restart normally (which I can).
Or hell, just anything, really. It's not that I'm completely reluctant to
ask for sighted help, but obviously it's inconvenient and really shouldn't
be necessary anyway.
So, any thoughts? What tricks has everybody learned and what applications
seem to be genuinely helpful in this sort of regard? I've heard from many
that the disk utilities packaged with Windows are not really the most
effective around, but I've no idea what to try (the last time I tried a
third-party diskchecker on my DOS system back in highschool it scrambled the
entire filesystem) and I'm currently looking for a new Antivirus as I got
completely fed up with the free AVG and uninstalled it.
I realise this is really a whole host of questions wrapped up into one post,
but I'm a bit in the dark and need to put out some feelers here to fellow
screenreader users.
Thanks!
JM
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