Olympus/Dragon bundle won't work with 64 bit W&

Hi,

I have an Olympus WS-110 dictation machine with integral USB to plug in like a dongle. The bundle comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking versiion 9 'Recorder Edition'. This version of Dragon NS is able to access the dictation machine and then provide an output file in the format of your choice. It worked fine on my old 32 bit machine running Vista but I now have a 64 bit machine (Acer Aspire 7540g running W7 home with all the latest updates from MS) and the Dragon NS will not even install but gives the error message that this software is not supported for 64 bit machines...and it terminates installation.

Dragon will sell me their version 11 that has this recorder capability for about $150 but that is way over what I, as a private individual, can afford...I paid $110 for the recorder and software a few years ago.

I've spent some hours researching on the Internet, and MS, and your forums and it seems that there is probably an unsupported drivers issue. I do actually have drivers for controlling the recorder so I can do voice playback under W7/64 bit control but I want to be able to take audio files off the recorder, into a folder and then voice to text.

I have tried running setup.exe in XP compatability mode and that doesn't help, and the installation fails at that stage.

Is it possible to buy an emulator so that Dragon 9 will run on my 64 bit machine 'thinking' that it is running on a 32 bit machine? The emulation for that software would have to be running before I select setup.exe I suppose?

Many thanks for you help, in anticipation

According to the compatibility center version 9 should work. Have you tried installing it in compatibility mode? What i would recommend is: first, make sure you are logged on as an administrator; second, turn off UAC (control panel\User Accounts ... change User Account Control settings ... turn it off); third, try the install routine normally; fourth, if that fails then right-click on the install ... choose properties ... compatibility tab ... check Run in compatibility mode ... Pick Vista SP2, then try running.

Be sure to turn UAC back on once completed.

Thanks, Trainable. I switched off the UAC but something got messed up in the process and slowed the machine to a near halt -- though oddly neither the CPU nor memory (according to Task Manager) were significant. Anyway, Mrs B. relies on my Internet connection so I switched on UAC again, and all is well -- except that we still haven't tried your suggestion. As soon as Mrs B can spare her connection I'll try it out.

Thanks again for your help....much appreciated

Barkie

UAC is a per user setting so if you turn it off for your userid it would not affect her settings. And Turning off UAC should have no negative effect on speed; it is strictly a safety warning to let you know programs are accessing your system areas (off=never notify), if anything it should be faster. When you install the program you wouldn't normally be accessing the internet at the same time so it is safe to turn it off but yes, you want it on again when you are browsing.

I live on a boat and use a shared (paid) WiFi system -- I am the subscriber and I use Connectify to produce another Hotspot from my machine which Mrs B. connects to. I can't think why the machine started to run so slowly but it recovered on the second re-boot (first was after turning-off UAC second was after turning back on again). I'll wait until Mrs B goes out....Hell hath no fury like Mrs B with a dicky Internet connection I will also close down all the non-essential background stuff this time during (attempted) installation. BTW, before turning off UAC I tried installing setup.exe in compatibility mode for Vista SP2, just on the off-chance, but it made no difference.

Thanks again for your help

Just one point...the message that comes up on attempted install is in a window in the style of the software vendor (Dragon/Nuance) not MS. The message says that the software supports 32 bit machines, not 64 bit. They don't suggest any work-around or where to get further information. What I mean is that this seems to be Nuance rejecting MS and not the other way round -- it that is relevant?

Then I doubt turning off UAC will help either

Maybe the bundled version isn't the full-blown ver 9 or maybe they offered 32 & 64 bit versions of it and yours is 32.

Do you have W7 Pro or Ultimate? If so you can use Virtual PC - XP mode. If you have Home then you could run another virtual environment if you own XP disks you could install. For either of these you also pretty much need 3GB of RAM or more. You can read about Virtualization options in our Freeware DB