On my home machine (HP laptop with 1GB of RAM) and my work computer, the microphone jacks seem to be fried. They don't respond at all to microphone input from a variety of mics. The ports worked perfectly well before using DNS.

 

Is it possible for DNS to "burn out" a soundcard? Should I try a USB headset? 

I now see you had tried other microphones. Try running the Windows Sound Recorder recording test to confirm whether the problem is Dragon itself or the HP microphone input connector.

Martin

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Martin Markoe - BANNED USER: This user has been banned from these forums

I had one headset for work and one for home. Both have stopped working, both jacks seem to be not responding to sound at all. When I run the audio tests, nothing happens. Two computers, two headsets seems kind of extreme.

In our opinion, all integrated soundcards are less than optimal with some being worse than others.  It's also extremely unlikely that NaturallySpeaking caused any problems to your current sound system.  It is far more likely that your integrated soundcard or input jack is damaged.  You could look at this as good news because you should be using a USB Pod external USB soundcard anyway.  It will probably be a lot easier to spend $40 on an external sound card rather than mail your computer back to HP.

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I ran across a similar problem recently on a computer that had both a microphone jack on the front of the computer and one on the back.  No matter what I did, Dragon would always change the input source to the jack on the back of the computer.  Do your computers have more than one microphone jack?

John,

That is a good point. As a matter of fact, we always recommend using a rear connector of a sound card rather than one in the front. The connectors in front of a computer firm often are connected to the sound card controller in the rear of the computer by cables that are often not shielded and will pick up electronic noise.

Martin

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Martin Markoe - BANNED USER: This user has been banned from these forums

OK, this has officially gotten strange.

 

I just got an external sound card, a USB SoundBlaster. The card *still* can't pick up input from the mic! I tried out a basic audio recording using the mic supplied with DNS and another I bought for work, same response; very little noise with a distant voice when I listen with the volume ALL the way up.

 

External sound card didn't do anything different. Help! 

Several of our clients have informed us that the Sound Blaster USB external soundcard is incompatible with NaturallySpeaking. We have tested and verified that the PCI notebook Sound Blaster card won’t work with NaturallySpeaking. That’s why we keep recommending USB Pods. Isn’t it time you started taking our advice? ;-)

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Thank you very much for the recommendation. I didn't have time to order one online, so I ended up going with a plug-in USB headset. For the moment it seems to be working just fine. If the performance is not as good as expected, I will definitely try a USB pod.

 

This response has been dictated, it's good to have it back. Thanks for the help.