DNS 11.5 has been working fine since 1st installed and activated 4 months ago.  It was working yesterday morning, but when the machine was rebooted in the afternoon, starting up Dragon lead to a dialog saying it needs to be activated and it could run 5 times before an activation is required.   (It's running on my roommate's XP Home SP3 machine with 2 GB) 

 Really don't want to use up an activation without knowing why this has happened and how to safeguard against this in the future.  (I've already read about how hard it is to get Nuance Tech Support to cough up even a single activation.  Aren't you only given 6 of them in ver. 11?)

Any suggestions on where to start looking?

There were no hardware changes made so the machine fingerprint "should" still the same as when it was first installed and activated.

Corruption of some registry key? (I'm quite comfortable with registry editing.)

 Any ideas and suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.

 

UPDATE: I just found out an iphone was plugged into the machine for changing yesterday morning and unplugged before the reboot. 

Apparently, it was automatically installed as a camera.  I plugged in it back in and then "uninstalled" it via "Device Manager"  Later today, I'll find out if this fixes the problem or not. I suspect it won't.

I suspect the way Dragon's hardware fingerprint is generated might make using USB devices problematic.  Anything to my suspicions?  Guidelines to avoid trouble?

 

 

jelson,

First, you are given five activations with DNS 11-11.5.

Second, this particular problem is usually caused by a balanced registry entry. However, don't bother even trying to edit the registry for DNS because you will only exacerbate the problem. The registry entry(s) for DNS activations is/are not user accessible or editable

Lastly, run a Repair of DNS. Go to Windows Control Panel | Add or Remove Programs, locate Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11, click on the Change button and when the InstallShield Wizard for Dragon NaturallySpeaking is displayed you will have three options: Modify, Repair, or Remove. Run Repair and let it run to completion. Reboot your system and you should no longer be prompted with the Activation dialog.

BTW, not a good idea to be running DNS 11 with BestMatch IV on the system that only has 2 GB of RAM. That's pushing it. The recommended minimum of RAM DNS 11-11.5 is 4 GB. If you're only running on 2 GB of RAM, you should using BestMatch III.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make speech recognition, we make it better!

If you hear the sound of hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.
variation on Occam's Razor (Law of Parsimony)

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Thanks, Chuck! Greatly appreciated.

 I'll give doing a Repair a try.

 

P.S. any links or posts about avoiding activation issues concerning usage of USB devices?  I'm planning to use DNS 11 Premium on a new Win7 machine I'm building.  I'm a bit of an enthusiast so I try to map out strategies to avoid problems before I get started.  

jelson,

DNS activation is independent of anything related to your hardware configuration. The only time that activation is affected at all is if you make a major change to your hardware that DNS detects and which changes the machine fingerprint that DNS uses for activation (activation registration). You would have make a major change your RAM, your motherboard, your CPU, etc. in ordered for the machine fingerprint change. However, if you're going to do that, it's simply a good idea to uninstall DNS first, recapture your activation, make the change to your hardware, and then reinstall DNS.

However, if you don't uninstall first, DNS will prompt you for a a new activation, but you simply do a manual activation and that will change the activation code without costing you an additional activation. Problems like these were resolved by Nuance several versions ago.

Lastly, you don't have to worry about Nuance giving you a hassle if you have to have your activations reset one time. They generally will simply ask you why and then reset your activations. It's when you have to ask Nuance a second time that they will give you a hard time (i.e., they will require you to buy an additional license). Everybody gets one activation reset without any real hassles.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make speech recognition, we make it better!

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is." - Yogi Berra

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Chucker wrote:

 Hmm, well, ran "Repair".  Was prompted to insert the 11.0 CD and did a reboot.  No JOY =>activation dialog came back up again...

I choose the Manual Act. button and entered the activation code.  Came right up without any dialogs popping up.

I'm assuming that it didn't cost me an activation.  But that does make me curious if there is a way to tell.  That is, is there some way to check how many activations you've (used / have left)?  BTW, registered online just the other day.

 Thanks for your help and expertise.

 P.S. do you know if Nuance uses the same activation protocols on their other products?  I've declined to try out their PDF & OCR apps precisely because of the activation horror stories I found when doing online research.

 

 

 

 

 

 

jelson,

The machine fingerprint encompasses only major changes to the hardware, such as motherboards, CPUs, or memory. The only time you would be prompted for a reactivation is if there were a major change in any of these. Simply adding memory won't do it, but replacing one type of memory with another, such as going from 1066 MHz to 1600 MHz RAM chips will cause a change in the machine fingerprint. Changing the hard drive used to cause a problem, but no longer does. Changing your CPU, which generally requires a change in the motherboard as well unless the current motherboard supports the new CPU, will trigger the reactivation dialog because these are the types of things that are recorded in the machine fingerprint. Swapping out USB devices, installing new hard drives, even, to a certain extent, changing motherboards but keeping the same CPU won't cause this type of problem Re: machine fingerprint. I know because I just change my motherboard so as to be able to accommodate USB 3.0 and 6.0Gb/s SATA III are drives, after which I installed a 256 GB SSD drive. None of this triggered a reactivation requirement. So, the current iterations of Dragon NaturallySpeaking are less sensitive to machine fingerprint changes, or they have eliminated machine fingerprint requirements from the activation process, which is what I suspect because what I did would have triggered a reactivation requirement in past versions of DNS.

However, is stored in the Windows registry in a CLSID key where the activation code is encrypted in binary format. Even if you were to find it which is highly unlikely, you wouldn't be able to edit or modify it anyway. My suspicion is that it may just simply have been bounced (corrupted or inadvertently deleted or whatever reason and don't ask me why). What I would suggest is that you do a complete uninstall while connected to the Internet. If the registry entry is there, this will trigger a reset of your activations. Be sure that you export your user profile before you do this, and then run the Dragon 11 remove utility (Dragon11remover.exe) so as to get rid of any remnants before reinstalling. Then a reinstall and reactivate. The worst-case scenario is that you simply lose one activation. God forbid you should lose all of them, Nuance will graciously reset your activations the first time around. I've never known anyone to have a problem with that. The second time around they will question you in detail and very likely require you to purchase another license. However, the first time around they don't generally give you any hassles as long as there's a reasonable explanation. For example, I had one client who call Nuance technical support explaining that they didn't understand how activations work and uninstalled and reinstalled five times without connecting to the Internet for each install. Nuance graciously reset their activations. On the other hand, I've known users to try and cheat by installing DNS on 13 different computers, which would require that Nuance reset their activations twice. They did it graciously the first time around, but then they discovered what was going on and refuse to do it the second time requiring the purchase of another license and putting them on notice about pulling that kind of crap, the consequence of which would be revoking their license. So, I wouldn't worry about losing activations (i.e., one or two) because you still have sufficient activations left. However, be careful how you uninstall and reinstall always making sure that you are connected to the Internet.

Uninstalling and reinstalling and then reactivating will eliminate the problem. If it doesn't, then something else is wrong. However, I would be very surprised if that occurred because you would probably be the first run into that brick wall.

There is one other thing that you can try. Under that condition that you are experiencing the resurfacing of the activation dialog, automatically activating may not fix the problem and the next time you launch Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you may be prompted again. This doesn't necessarily cost you an activation. It more often than not causes just simply aggravation. However, when you run into a problem like this and you do a manual activation, this is a tedious process of going up in getting a new activation code and then entering that in the appropriate location in the activation dialog under manually install, but it generally doesn't cost you an activation because it is treated as a reset vs. an actual activation. In other words, manual activation is used when you're not connected to the Internet and your accessing the activation server on another system that is. However, you might try this and simply be careful to follow the instructions precisely and exactly. This is the method that you use if you make major changes to your hardware that are detected relative to changes in machine fingerprint requiring reactivation. Doing a manual activation doesn't reset your activations, but it doesn't add an activation either.

For example, you say you're building a new system. So, you take the hard drive from your old system and you put it in your new system and then you try to launch Dragon NaturallySpeaking. This will trigger the reactivation dialog because the machine fingerprint on your new system will be completely different than once recorded. By doing a manual activation, this simply resets Dragon NaturallySpeaking is activation for that system with out reducing the number of activations. This is something that Nuance instituted back after DNS 9-9.5 is because there were too many problems of this nature occurring. So, because of the way it works, using the manual activation sometimes works to fix even the problem that you're experiencing. You can try it, but I wouldn't guarantee absolutely that it will fix the problem. You may need to do a complete uninstall and reinstall as specified above.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make Dragon NaturallySpeaking, we make it better!

"If anything can possibly go wrong, it generally will and at the worst possible moment." (Murphy's law - Edward A. Ourphy, Jr.)

Another variant of this is, "If there is a 1 in 10 million chance that something that you do will fail or go wrong, just remember that you are #1."

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Thanks for the detailed explanation.

I was editing my prior post while you were writing your reply. 

Yeah, worst case, a single activation was lost.  

I've run into activation issues with other apps suddenly asking for a reactivation without apparent reason.  But that was on my own personal machine and the solution was simple: I restored the previous image of my system partition using Acronis.

 

 

 

 

jelson,

Yes, restoring an image will usually fix the problem as well. I've done that on occasion using Acronis TrueImage.

However, reread my post because I made some edits and added a section on manual activation which may be useful in your case. No guarantees, but it has worked for me in the past.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make Dragon NaturallySpeaking, we make it better!

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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Thanks, appreciate the added info.

 Let's hope the manual activation fixed the problem.  If not, I'll do the uninstall, Dragon-remover and re-install.