dawsonq49 wrote: Longtime Dragon NaturallySpeaking user. Buying new computer and will try out the Windows speech recognition product. Should I get a 32-bit or 64-bit computer? Pros and cons. Any former Dragon NaturallySpeaking users who have switched over two the Windows product? How you like it?

All modern multi core (four or more) processors will support 64 bit computing. The problem is very few programs actually use 64 bit computing. For example, Dragon NaturallySpeaking supports 64 bit but as I understand it does not actually take advantage of the multi core processing. Having said this, Microsoft has implemented 64 bit Windows Operating Systems to easily support 32 bit programs as they are. Therefore any windows installations we currently do use the 64 bit version of Windows. And

I am pretty hands-disabled and need to be able to run my computer completely by voice. Thanks for any info. It's a long time since I bought a computer.

If your new computer is a multi core computer with 4 GB RAM you should be quite pleased with its quicker boot up and shut down time and general reliability and high performance. Just make sure to go to Windows Updates in Control Panel and make a setting so updates do not install automatically. Before we did this, we found updates would install when we tried to shut down the computer and go home and it gave a message to not shut off the computer.

Here is an our take on Dragon NaturallySpeaking vs. WSR (Windows Speech Recognition). WSR is free. WSR has a very nice free and powerful macro program, WSRMacros. WSR has excellent built in navigation and command. Are you familiar with the, "Show numbers," feature? Try it on any window that has buttons and links and you will see what I mean. WSR has good accuracy for general business vocabulary when using it for e-mail and correspondence. If you use the WSRToolkit, much of the functionality/usability of Dragon NaturallySpeaking will be unavailable.

Having said all of the above, here is our take on Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon has a much more mature user interface than WSR. Dragon has a much better correction facility which allows you to type in a correction. In WSR if you do not find the words you dictated in the correction box you can repeat the words and see if they come up. However, you cannot type the correction in correction box. You must spell out the words if not found, a tedious process.

As for accuracy, Dragon is more accurate out of the box. Dragon also handles audio levels well while WSR is a slave to the poor audio levels of the Windoes Audio sub-system.

Bottom line, if you do professional dictation and require the highest accuracy, Dragon is best. If your needs are more for command and control and general business correspondence, then WSR is an excellent choice.