I recently had the job of replacing the text of a Swedish PowerPoint (Office 2007) presentation with English text.

I've been using Nuance's PDF Converter s/w for several years with excellent results, so when the version 5 came out, I ordered the CD distribution disk and upgraded from v. 4.

Here's a brief item in today's Washington Post about using a Sony recorder for meetings, etc.

Quite a while ago I brought up the subject of losing the cursor in Word. I recall that it was called "losing focus" when it came up for discussion on one of the DNS sites several years ago. It happens mostly on docs larger than 10-15 pages and can be cured temporarily by closing DNS and restarting. I've never seen it happen in Dragon Pad, which I usually use if I don't need tables. I have 960 MB of RAM and run DNS 9.10 SP1 under Windows XP and Word 2003 SP2.

For a couple of days now I've had occasional crashes when I make a correction -- I get an error that "an internal recognizer error has occurred. NS may be in an unstable state, etc.
The log for this event shows:

I recall that we had an extended discussion a couple of years ago on losing the cursor In Microsoft Word. I'm using Dragon version 9 with Word 2003 and almost never have a cursor visible on the screen. I get along without it pretty well, but I wonder whether we ever had a resolution of the problem. I just dictated almost 2000 words in a little over an hour and a half with a total of three misrecognition errors, so I am willing to overlook the occasional bug.

You may recall my chagrin when I accidentally got solvent on disk 1 of my new DNS 9 upgrade and ran into a stone wall with Nuance's tech support staff for a replacement. A sympathetic rep in sales finally told me that I could replace the disk for a $30 charge (apparently because the replacement disk has to be customized with my key number).

I just tried DNS 9 with Writely and it seems to run a little faster than with Word. Writely is a very interesting development, a Web-server based word processor that allows all sorts of collaboration between users. I think it's going to have applications in the translation industry. Wikipedia has a good review.

I finally faced the reality that my good old Andrea mike was getting noisy and ordered a Sennheiser ME3 with USB interface. WOW! WHAT A DIFFERENCE! I usually cruise along translating at about a thousand words an hour. I just finished a piece of 2700+ words in just over 80 minutes with a total of about three misrecognitions. I'd like the mike to be positioned to my left, but I guess I can fiddle with it a little. I get a s/n ratio of 25.

I received a Dell catalog today and they have some good prices on pretty powerful workstations with dual processors, fast memory and lots of storage capacity. Has anyone run DNS on a really high-end machine?