is the Acer Intel Celeron M430 Notebook powerful enough for dragon naturally speaking?

Question

Hello, I have an old Dell Inspiron 5100 which has a CPU that is 2.66 GHz, and I have one gig of RAM. It does pretty decent for me to dictate into. However the video card is only 32 MB, so I can only use XP's medium color setting; or else the old graphics card drains the whole system. I've looked in the upgrading the card but it would cost more than buying this Acer lap top I'm considering/I've been reading reviews and they claim the Acer is mediocre at best? If anyone out there has one or knows what they're like please let me know if they're any good?? also I have a lot of peripherals to work with XP will they work on Vista??

Have a great week -- thank you in advance!

Answer 1

For Dragon 9, I would suggest XP with 1GB or Vista with 2GB, otherwise you are not going to get the full benefit of the dictation engine.

As for processor, aim for minimum Pentium4 3GHz or a dual core CPU.

Acer is ok, they are cheap and cheerful, nothing to write home about, had few of them for years purely based on price.

Answer 2

Hi I have an acer 3692 wlmi which has the M430 processor.

It's a very good machine for the money and would say it far better than dell, packard bell or advent.

It was £400 and out performs my old pc which was a packard bell with 2.2ghz processor running 512mb ram. The acer knocks the spots of the much faster machine and doesn't have the packard bell problems which was only 3 years old when I threw it away.

Am not sure how it will run dragon though but you could have a look at the acer 5612wlmi available from comet at £449.

This is the same as my son's machine which he uses for web design and is dual core. Unfortunately it now comes with vista but have a look at the 5103 advertised on ebuyer. Tat one comes with later processor and 2gb ram.

You get what you pay for but I can definately recommend acer and would certainly buy another one.