There's a horrible bug that makes most (if not all) new Dell computers, including some Dell desktops, unusable with screen reading software for the blind.<p>They install some audio-related bloatware from Waves which really doesn't like something about the way screen readers use the sound card. This is specifically a Dell issue, I've never seen it on a non-Dell device, and it occurs independently of what screen reader you use. The worst part is that, due to how the Windows 10/11 update mechanism works, this issue occurs even if you install a clean Windows image.<p>The issue causes the size of unpaged (kernel) memory to increase indefinitely, and when the memory consumption gets to over 90%, weird errors start showing up, sometimes the system hangs, sometimes it blue screens, sometimes it behaves as if a USB device was constantly being plugged and then quickly unplugged and so on. One way or another, the device becomes unusable. When trying to determine the source of the memory leak with poolmon, it's attributed to the Windows event logging system, out of all things.<p>There are workarounds, but they're less than ideal, one requires admin privileges and doesn't work on some models, the other disables the ability to handle headphone-port events, so, when you unplug your headphones, the audio doesn't switch back to the internal speaker.<p>I've personally started seeing this issue on my laptop around the middle of 2020, but other users report seeing it as early as 2019. It has been reported to Dell multiple times, including by the screen reader developers themselves, and nothing has been done. A couple months ago, a fix has finally been promised, probably to stop the hordes of blind people from complaining, but the issue hasn't actually been fixed yet, and nobody knows if it ever will be.