hi there, again time for me to put my 2 paws in to the mix here. jaws has its good points, and so does NVDA, but the blazing facts that, jaws is no longer what it was, stil remains, its over sized, its programming code is over bloated,
its held together by patches and repatches and bug fixes of bugs that was fixed. and broke, and features, that could have been implimented 3 or 4 versions ago. only gets baked in after 1 majour versions release. 
those whose in the no, will no what i am talking about. those who understands about over sized files. needless code, way to big vidio mirroring display drivers. wil no what i am on about here. o, and the person who mensioned the pc techs having a hard time ware jfw mest up his screen. u wil no what i am talking about here as well. but, all these things aside, if jaws works for you. let it continue to do so. but, if you feel it does not.
believe me, NVDA is the way to go. it just saddens, me to no. that jfw can be so much better, trust me on that. if FS really wanted to? they could make this a beautiful product to be prowed of
to own. a product that. wil not mess with the way a pc interacts in a sighted user/corpret environment. a product who, has the prowed technical support. teem, who, does not give u a repertition of a email saying. sorry we cant help you because you must only deel with your local dealers in your cuntry. a teem, who takes the end user in mind, who has to leagaly  liecence jaws to work on his pc's. instead of being treated like a pyrot.
Would I use jaws again. most defenatly, i continue to test it until this day. but every time i look at it, i see stagnation. and tag along features hooked on to it, but yes. jaws is powerful in some areas. i grant you that.
but technology mooves on.
and if FS does not wake up. they might find there sharky stranded on the beech some day.
that wil be a sad day indeed.
If I may use a slight variation of the  quote from grafindors signiture.
there's no more a sadder sentence,  in tung or pen, then, it might have been.

hi afrim,
just to clarify on the size issue. there are cuntries in the world. that stil has what we call, capt internet. this meens that you pay for every bite of data you consume on the internet. i was refering to the default install package size for jaws. the other voice sizes u mension. is what i consider luckshuary voices. i most certenly conceed that, size is not a huge issue as what it was before. how ever it stil is a very important issue. because. if u take size, as well as memory foot print in to consideration. jfw stil consumes more. then other screan readers.
i can say though. i am looking forward to test jaws sixteen in windows 10. once sixteens ready for prime time. i'd love to stack up NVDA as well. and see how things goes.
some fun times lays ahead.

also, as for handeling progress bars. could you clarify for me, how NVDA does not handel it correctly, I stand corrected but i think there's 2 settings. the 1 tells nvda only to reed the progress bar if u got focus to the ap. but, say if u select for nvda to beep or speek back ground progress bars. then, you can basically alt tab away from say, the windows file coppying dialogue. and u wil stil no how far it is. its quite fun if u download multaple files. and u here the bars beep for all of them. smile.

NVDA has some weaknesses. First of all is the synthesizer ESpeak, which sounds robotic, although it supports many languages compared to eloquence. But at least eloquence is great. I've noticed that they are not making any update to eloquence since jaws 13, and I don't like this. For example, british English is so bad there, Italian isn't so good. NVDA crashes faster when other programs do. Navigating on the internet with NVDA is boring. Reading books or documents with NVDA isn't bad, but it is not as good as reading them with jaws. NVDA provides the eloquence, but it is not so much integrated compared to Jaws. Jaws eloquence will read more words which are shortened for example, (E T C, etc ), (E S C, esc), (C T R L, ctrl) etc.
They can be added to the dictionary; but remember that they are too much and you cannot remember all.
When other programs crash while you work with NVDA, the synthesizer will read everything while you try to stop it, but it will not do. It is very difficult to make it stop until you open jaws or force close it without using a screen reader. Mouse support on NVDA is not fully integrated with touchpads built-in Laptops. It is true that you can choose to beap while you move your finger around the mouse so that you can better concentrate, but that won't help. At least I can't use it.

Hello,
You don't need to start jaws to quit nvda. Just create a shortcut to nvda.exe, assign a hotkey to it, and when you press that hotkey, ctrl alt n for example, the program restarts automatically. It's about 5 seconds.

That is an opinion, not neccessarily a weakness. Besides, the dictionary is editable, just delete them if you don't like them.

That's common sense anyway, I put a hot key on all the JAWS shortcuts. If anything happens that crashes JAWS or you need to exit JAWS for whatever reason, it's the only way you can restart JAWS without having to do a restart of Windows.

That's interesting, you should instal it for better Access  to the logon screen and secure desktops.

Then he shouldn't install it, that's very obvious

one of the things that got added in jaws 16 was the force quit option for jaws. I don't remember the exact keystroke, but what this does is if you are having a problem with jaws or it is hanging, you can force quit it with this keystroke, which completely unloads it from memory. Also, if jaws hangs for 20 or 30 seconds now, it restarts automaticly.

As I've said earlier, I plan to try NVDA to see if I like it better than JAWS. What I'd like to know is, how difficult will adjusting to NVDA be, I mean, are their commands similar or quite different. I ask because if their very different, it may not be worth learning a new system to accomplish basically the same thing.

I am in the process of building a new Windows installation on a SSD. Until I joined these forums, I didn't know anything about NVDA,.

So, while I am learning NVDA, I'll post the differences I see between the two.

Right now I have two issues with NVDA, the first anhd most important, it doesn't work with the file manager I prefer. It apparently can't see anything in the file manager's window. Hopefully this is just a matter of getting NVDA configured so that it will work with my file manager. If this can't be fixed, that's a deal breaker right there, my learning to use NVDA would be limited to just those areas where I want a feature it has that JAWS doesn't. Instant translation for example for playing those Japanese games. I'll keep using JAWS for most of my computing needs.

The other issue is more of a what I'm used to thing, put simply, I don't like the way you navigate through HTML in NVDA When I first started using NVDA, I could have sworn that the arrow keys skipped over things like lists instead of browsing through them. To get to the entries in the lists, I had to switch to another set of keys to get to the entries. JAWS was just the opposite, if you want to skip over something, that's when you used keys other than your normal navigation keys.

One feature in JAWS that I have yet to find in NVDA is that you can customize JAWS' behavior for each program you use, JAWS does have default settings that are used until you adjust something for a specific program. For most programs the global setting are fine, but every once in a while you find a setting you want different but only for one particular program. So far, all I've found in NVDA are global settings, but I've only started looking at it. I'd have to believe it's there somewhere. As I've found in JAWS, one set of settings isn't going to work for all the programs you might use on your computer.

That's all for now, as I learn more about NVDA, I'll compare it to what I know of JAWS here.

I hope somebody will find it useful.

You've never use a file manager call Norton Commander for DOS. It is what is called a dual pane file manager. Imagine two instances of Windows Explorer side by side on your screen. Pressing the tab key noves your cursor from windows to the other. Each window os pointing at the contents of a different directory. Now you can chose a single file, selct multifiles, or use a pattern to select files. Then with a single key stroke, copy or move those files to the directory in the other window, delete the files, or pack them into a zop file with the zip file going into the directory in the other window. It a very fast and intuitive way to do general file maintenance. The file manager I use is dual pane file manager just like Norton Commander for DOS, but this one is for Windows. Dual pane file managers must be popular because there are quite a few of them. The one I use is called Altap Salamander, if you want to know more, you can go to their web site here: http://www.altap.cz

I don't understand, how does changing your settings yourself prevent you from helping other people? And I don't recall asking for help anyway. I may be blind, but I am far from helpless. I wouldn't ask you for help anyway, By the way you phrased your remarks, it's obvious that you have no interest in helping other people, so I won't inconvenience you.