Neither Dave, nor I, nor the sighted friend we consulted by phone has seen this issue, and since we don't know where the problem may be we're asking for help from both lists. If the issue doesn't appear to pertain to the list on which you are reading this, please bear with me. It just might.
This afternoon Dave returned from the grocery store to find his desktop computer chattering unexpectedly. It was saying, "Percent, percent, percent" and was announcing the window title, which happened to be our local newspaper, "Visalia Times Delta." He had been reading the paper when he left for the store. He decided he needed to reboot. He attempt to do so, but just as the opening musical cord of the Windows logon screen was about to finish, the tone suddenly began to reverberate, as though in an endless loop. He phoned our very savvy computer tech friend and asked for help, or at least ideas. The computer is an older oem Windows desktop unit with a 1.2GHZ AMD processor and 512MB of ram. Jed instructed Dave to boot in safe mode. He accomplished this by rapid taps of the F8 key as the computer was loading. Eventually the drive stopped. Dave pressed enter a few times and heard slight disk activity. Once in safe mode he shut down the computer with Windows plus u. Having done this, he and Jed concluded it was not a hard drive issue. Of course Dave could read no messages on the screen, and we have another knowledgeable sighted friend coming by tomorrow morning to have a look at it. The last significant change Dave made was to install Window-Eyes 7.0 Beta 1. He doesn't recall whether he was using W/E or JAWS when he left the computer and the house, but has experienced sluggishness in the beta. I believe he has speech set to load at startup. Our questions are whether anyone on either list has ever observed anything like this, and whether anyone suspects whether the Window-Eyes beta would be slow enough to cause this problem. Yes, the machine is probably nearing the end of its usefulness, but he wants to at least be able to give the techs at the computer shop as much info as he can before leaving with them for repairs if necessary. Again, thank you for your indulgence in this cross post, and we'll be looking forward to any educated guesses or thoughts, if not actual experiences. I'll inform the list what we find in the hopes of sparing someone else this consternation. Pam and Dave, most perplexed If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
