I don't have any direct experience with the Sony notebook you are working
with, but other notebooks allow you to configure the processing power, how
long before the hard drive winds down, and backlighting on the screen when
being powered from the battery. You might want to check this out. But it
will however significantly shorten your battery life when running the
computer at full speed.
Let us know if you are able to customize the processor speed under battery
power.
Allan Kinnee, BMET
kinneea@cadvision.com
Technology Consultant
Technical Resource Centre
200, 1201 - 5th Street SW
Calgary, AB T2R 0Y6
kinneea@cadvision.com
-----Original Message-----
The search for a very light speech recognition notebook is far from over. I
have been putting the Sony PCG-505FX through its paces. Encouraged by its
266Mhx processor, 4 gig HD and 64 megs of RAM, small footprint and 3lb.
weight. Unfortunately the soundchip is utterly useless. It should have a
noise-to-signal ratio rather than a signal-to-noise ratio. I am absolutely
sure that Thomas Edison's first attempt at recording produced far better
results than this computer. This a real disappointment from an audio company
like Sony.
I then tried a PCMCIA WaveJammer soundcard. After trying a number of
microphones the only one that began to produce decent results was the Shure
HW505. I was finally able to train up Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional
Edition and was getting quite nice recognition results while plugged in to
AC power. I then attempted to test this unit under a fully charged battery. The
display immediately dimmed and the any hope of either performance or
recognition went right out the window. Apparently the battery is not
producing any where near the same current that the AC does. When the current
drops the computer becomes so sluggish it is useless. I have observed this
problem even when the Wavejammer PCMCIA card is not installed in the computer.
It is my guess that in order to get any time out of the extremely small battery
that they use that they cut the current down rendering this computer virtually
useless. It is possible that this unit may perform better with the
unavailable larger capacity battery. I consider this computer while under
battery; power-starved and well outside the window of performance necessary to
support speech recognition.
Marty Tibor
martytib@synapseadaptive.com
1 Stop Speech Recognition and Adaptive Technology Synapse
3095 Kerner Blvd., Suite S, San Rafael, CA 94901
toll-free 888-285-9988
http://www.synapseadaptive.com
Providers of adaptive and assistive technology solutions.
http://www.unixspeech.com
UNIX, mainframe and Mac speech recognition
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/default.htm
Synapse hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Unofficial Information Pages
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