I bought my new machine, a Compaq Presario at Best Buy specifically because I wanted to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10. My old computer just had too old of processor. I’d bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred edition specifically because I wanted to be able to use my digital voice recorder. I wanted to be able to record blog posts while driving to and from work. Or any other times when I have spare time. I was able to hook up my USB microphone to the machine and record using NaturallySpeaking. But I had also recorded some blog posts on my digital voice recorder which is a Panasonic RR-US 360 digital voice recorder which I’ve had for years. I bought it because I can download recordings into my machine via a USB port. I download the recordings onto my machine at work, and transferred them to a USB drive. I was able to copy those to my new machine. And after training the NaturallySpeaking software, I was able to transcribe some of those posts from a digital voice recorder. But when I went to set up my USB Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder on my new machine I got an error saying that the driver was not installed. I had installed the Voice Studio software that came with the digital voice recorder. Apparently it didn’t install the driver or the driver was not compatible with Windows 7. Searching around on the Internet, I found many sites mentioning a Windows 7 driver for the Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder. But many of these seem to be spam sites with little or no content. The page title would mention Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder and Windows 7 driver, but when you went there the pages were full of ads or if you followed through the links they would ask you to click on advertiser links to be able to download the driver. I went to Panasonic’s website to search for new drivers but there were no download sections there, not even for the older drivers or software. I submitted a tech support request asking about Windows 7 drivers for the Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder and got a prompt reply back from Panasonic.
“We regret to inform you but your RR-US360 is not compatible with Windows 7. It can only be compatible with Windows 98, 2000, millenium ed. and XP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
I e-mailed backasking clarifying that they would not be releasing Windows 7 drivers for the Panasonic RR-US360 digital voice recorder “So you are telling me, you are not coming out with new drivers for Windows 7? And so I have an expensive paperweight?”
They responded back thanking me for my patronage of Panasonic. “Your patronage as a Panasonic customer is truly valued. Therefore, we appreciate this information regarding your experience with our product. We do regret to hear of your dissatisfaction. Be assured all consumer comments, whether favorable or not, are appreciated. All comments are investigated and given careful consideration in our continuing effort to produce high quality products, and customer service that consumers expect from our label.”
One of the reasons I bought this digital voice recorder was because it was USB and figured that being a plug-in to a machine would be fairly standard. But apparently my digital voice recorder will not work with Windows 7 ever. Because they will not be releasing new drivers for Windows 7. And mine is just one of a bunch of Panasonic digital voice recorders that came out about that time. So they are basically abandoning all of those older digital voice recorders, leaving all of the users in the lurch with useless pieces of hardware. I e-mailed back to Panasonic tech-support saying that I will no longer be buying any Panasonic products. If this is the way they support their products, I have no interest in buying any more. Why would I buy a new Panasonic digital voice recorder if when Windows 8 or Windows 9 or whatever comes out, I will longer be able to use it. It’s not like it’s some sort of specialized piece of hardware that should be limited to by the operating system. I can still plug in my digital camera, and printer and scanner, and they work fine. Though for my scanner I did have to download a new driver. Plustek, the company that made my scanner is much smaller than great big Panasonic. But they managed to come out with a new Windows 7 driver. So Panasonic sucks, and I will no longer buy any Panasonic products. I’m currently looking at a new digital voice recorder made by Olympus.
I got my new Compaq Presario computer that I bought at Best Buy home and started getting everything hooked up. One of the first things I noticed was there was no parallel port. On my old machine I had my LaserJet 4 laser printer hooked to the computer via the parallel port. But since the new computer had no parallel port, I wasn’t quite sure how to hook up my laser printer. I love my laser printer. I can print large amounts of pages for very cheap. Much cheaper than using the inkjet printer. My HP LaserJet 4 printer is a workhorse. It will keep going and going and going. So I definitely want to hook it up. I went online to Amazon.com and started searching for a USB parallel port adapter. I found a cable made by CablesToGo that had really good reviews. It was the “USB to DB25 IEEE-1284 Printer Adaptor”. Reading through the reviews, many of the people had used it to hook up their own HP LaserJet printers to computers running Windows 7. Many of the people said they plugged it in, turned it on and the printer was installed automatically. I also looked at buying a new parallel card for my machine. My new machine has several empty slots to install a new card. So I searched for parallel port cards and many of those had mixed reviews. Some people had problems getting them to run under Windows 7, having to install special drivers. After comparing the cards versus the adapter cable, I decide to go with cable. The cable only cost about $14 at Amazon with free shipping. Some of the cards were a little cheaper but not significantly so. I ordered the cable. The cable came on Friday in the mail. I opened it up, plugged it in and almost immediately the computer recognized the adapter. I plugged my LaserJet printer into the cable, and turned it on. Reading through the instructions, they wanted me to use the printer Wizard to install my printer to LPT1 port. So I did this, and tried to print a test page. Nothing happened. I uninstalled the printer and reinstalled the printer again to the LPT1 port, and printed a test page. Again nothing happened. I tried rebooting the computer printing a test page and nothing happened. I tried the LPT2 port and LPT3 port, but still couldn’t print the test page. I went to the CablesToGo website to search for any tech-support information regarding this cable but didn’t really find any answers. I did submit a support request. They have live chat at the CablesToGo website, but that’s during weekdays and during business hours. I was thinking I would have to wait for the support people to get back to me before I could install the printer. But I hadn’t given up, I kept searching for answers but found none. I reinstalled the printer on the LPT1 porp and tried printing a test page, but nothing came out. I right-click on the printer and found that I could select the port. I saw that my inkjet printer was on the USB001 virtual printer port. Out of curiosity I decided to set my LaserJet 4 printer to be hooked up to USB002 virtual printer port. I went to print a test page and the printer printed it. Very cool. So now I have a working LaserJet printer hooked up to my new machine which is one of seven. While the instructions were not completely accurate, the adapter cable works very well once I did get it installed correctly. I still haven’t heard back from the cables to go support team, but I just sent the request yesterday which was a Saturday, and I had kind of expect to hear something back tomorrow which will be Monday.
I got my new computer. My older eMachines computer wasn’t able to run naturally born speaking version 10. So I decided it was time to get a new computer. While my old computer was probably about six or eight years old. My new computer is a Compaq Presario with an Athlon or AMD Athlon II dual core processor has three gig of memory, and a 500gb hard drive. I got it at Best Buy packaged with a monitor for a pretty good deal. I’ve been working on getting it all set up, copying files installing software. I’ve had a few issues. For instance it doesn’t have a parallel port and my old machine did have a parallel port. So I had to order an adapter cable so you hook up my older HP LaserJet 4 printer to it. And it’s got four USB ports on the back. But two of those are used by the mouse and keyboard. I still have to hook up an inkjet printer and scanner, external hard drive. And once I get the adapter cable, the LaserJet 4 printer to the back of the computer too. But there’s fortunately also two USB ports on the front of the computer which will be nice if hooking up a a camera and also a digital voice recorders at the same time. I had a little bit issue hooking up my Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner last night. When I plugged it in, it would come up saying USB device not recognized. I managed to download a new driver from the Plustek website and got it to work. Then I was able to install software that originally came with the scanner. I still have more files to copy from the older computer, but I hope to get that done in the next few weeks. And theres still all the newer software to install such as Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10, which is why I bought the computer in the first place.
I went and picked up my new computer last night at Best Buy. Compaq Presario Desktop with AMD Athlon II Dual-Core Processor, 3 gig of ram, 500gb hard drive, and all kinds of stuff. But it’s fast enough, and has all the stuff that needs to be able to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 10. It actually meets or exceed the recommended setup. I pulled the stuff out of boxes, and set it up on a card table near my other computer. I booted it up and got the browser up and running. I copied the bookmarks from my old computer over to the new computer. That was successful although they were totally out of order from how I had them on my other computer. Then I started getting the mail program set up. My old computer had Outlook Express, but the new computer has Windows Live Mail. I managed to get Windows Live Mail setup to where I can receive and send e-mails. Now I’m trying to get my old e-mails from Outlook Express installed into Windows Live Mail. I found the e-mails on my old computer and copied the folders onto a thumb drive and I’ve managed to import them into Windows live Mail. But unfortunately it just keeps putting them into the unread e-mail folder instead of putting them into the individual folders like I had them over on Outlook Express. So I may need to do some more research to see if I can do what I want to do. I estimate it will probably take me a couple weeks before I finally get everything moved over to the new machine. My plan is to get the browser up and running, and get the e-mail program up and running which I partially due to all my old e-mails copied over a drywall use e-mail program on the old computer and all. Once I have that stuff set up, I will move my old computer off the computer desk and out of the rack and move the new computer over there. Then set up my old computer on the card table, and I can copy stuff off at my leisure.