In January I purchased Dragon 11.5 Premium from the KnowBrainer store. I have not yet used it, but recently tried to set it up on my desktop computer (homebuilt several years ago) and received the message that the Natural Language commands for Microsoft Office software would not be loaded due to insufficient system resources. May I solicit the wisdom of the fora participants as to whether it is worth upgrading the system or whether I will need to rebuild it instead?

The specifications are as follows: Gigabyte S-series motherboard supporting AMD Socket AM 2 (GA-MA69VM-S2). Supports up to 16 GB of DDRII DIMM. Front side bus: 2000 MHz. Chipset: Northbridge: AMD 690V. Southbridge: AMD SB600. AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor. Ultra 400 W ATX Power Supply. Vista operating system.

I currently have 2 GB of RAM in this system. If I upgraded, I would switch to Windows 7 and add 6 GB of RAM. Would this system be adequate for Dragon 11.5? If so, could you recommend a modestly priced hard drive to complete the system? (I do not download videos or music, so all of the current hard drives have vastly more space than I need, but my current hard drive is very noisy, and is probably nearing the end of its life.)

My other computer is a ThinkPad Edge with 4 GB of RAM (cannot accept any more). I can't find the model number in spite of much searching. The system information indicates the following: Intel Core i3 CPU M330 @ 2.13 GHz  2.13 GHz. It has Windows 7 Professional (plus Office 10, which I added). The hard drive is acting as if it is going to fail (refusing to boot windows half the time). Possibly reformatting the hard drive will help (I had a nasty worm six months ago which messed up certain applications). However, even if it does, I am unsure if I would have adequate resources to run Dragon 11.5. Any opinions on this other dilemma?

Thanks very much for any and all input.

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Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net

In our opinion, 2 Gb of RAM is unacceptable. NaturallySpeaking looked at your system and decided that it was underpowered. To make things run a little faster, NaturallySpeaking automatically disengaged the Natural Language Commands for Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and WordPerfect. If you wish to enable these commands, you will need to open your DNS Tools/Options/Commands Tab, click the Natural Language Commands button and add checkmarks to each item you wish to enable.

If you're planning on using your system as is, we would recommend against enabling the Natural Language Commands. We would additionally recommend moving the Speed vs. Accuracy slider to Fastest Response and creating a new user profile based on Best Match III rather than the default Best Match IV (see advanced options).

To specifically answer your question… We believe that quadrupling your RAM and installing Windows 7 64-bit would be adequate but just that.

Your ThinkPad i3 is also adequate but seriously on the low-end of adequate.

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Thanks very much for the feedback. No, definitely not planning to use the system as it is. I realized when it didn't load the Natural Language commands that the 2 GB of RAM weren't going to cut it, even with Vista. Since it sounds like I might get away with 8 GB of RAM on the existing system with Windows 7, I think I will give that a try first. Rebuilding to the specs recommended in recent posts for Dragon 11.5 is going to be an expensive proposition, and given my decidedly mixed results with prior versions of Dragon, I want to make sure first that I am happy with the voice recognition it provides.

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Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net

Scribe,

You won't have any problems with 8 GB of RAM using Windows 7 64-bit and DNS 11-11.5. In fact, you could even get away with 6 GB because that's all I have on my laptop. However, my laptop is a Toshiba Satellite Core™ i7 quad core 2670QM second-generation Core™ i processor. Works just fine on my laptop with no problem running Windows 7 64-bit and Microsoft Office 2010 64-bit along with a number of other applications all loaded and running simultaneously.

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

"Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count." Albert Einstein

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Thanks, Chucker. I hope I get as good results. The discussions on this board have been mainly of Intel processors, and since what I have on the desktop is an older Athlon (circa 2006, I think), I have been unsure how the combo will shape up. But my past experience has been that memory seems to make a much greater difference than processor speed. I hope that will be the case.

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Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net