I don’t know how many novelists (or in my case, wannabe novelists) there are out there who use voice-recognition software to write, but I suppose this applies to anybody who works with large MS Word documents.
Whenever my documents reach 100 pages or so, Dragon NaturallySpeaking slows waaaaaaay down. Basically, it becomes unusable.
I was blaming this on my old computer (1 gig processor and 256MB of RAM), but I recently purchased a new computer with a speedy 64-bit processor and one gig of RAM, among other snazzy doodads. The computer works great for video editing, recording stuff off TV, and just about anything else you can think of, but I still can’t use Dragon NaturallySpeaking with large MS Word documents. By the way, I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7.0 Preferred Edition, and I downloaded Service Pack 2, so technically it’s 7.3.
It’s not really a huge deal (I’ve gotten used to breaking down my novels into smaller files, or just working on a chunk at a time), but it’s a bit of an inconvenience. For the record, I also had this problem when I used L&H VoiceXpress.
If anybody stumbles across this post and has any suggestions for tweaks or workarounds that I could try, please feel free to leave your comments. I’m not married to MS Office, so I’d be willing to try other Suites, or buy more RAM if I thought that would make a difference.