Great marketing guys. The message is that I am stupid to think Vista is bloatware. Vista does not have a problem, it the customers who have a problem.

Let me offer a suggestion to Microsoft - belittling your customers is not a good idea. It will create customers who will go out of their way to buy someone else's products.

To me Vista is full of cutesy features none of which I am interested in. But which I strongly suspect hog my disk space, and worse take my CPU cycles to do things I don't care two hoots in Hades about. And Microsoft offers no help in the tedious process of disabling the bloat.

Windows XP needs 300MHz CPU, 128MB RAM, 1.5GB Disk
Vista needs 1GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, 15 GB Disk.
By those measures XP is far and away superior when run on a hardware platform shipped with Vista.

By the way, I see Nuance claims "DNS 10 is faster".
Does that mean it will run as well as DNS 9 when on a slower CPU?
I thought not. In the race between faster hardware and slower software the hardware seems to be losing.

Oh Goodie! An invitation to flame!

Actually, I agree with many of your points, although I wonder whether on second thought you might not come to rue the tone

But (and the flame now begins) Vista vs. XP is scarcely an "eternal" issue -- shoot, its barely annual. The google target you posit essentially leads you to a series of tedious steps to turn Vista back into XP -- i.e., it shows that Vista is nothing more than a Potemkin village. Which begs the question, who benefits from Vista -- basically M$' cash flow, which torques the nether parts considering M$ probably has the largest cash balance of any corporation in the world yet doesn't seem to know how to spend it wisely nor invest it profitably -- but so what, its their money and millions of damn fools are perfectly happy throwing their easily earned bucks at them, so good on them I say! Its the American way to screw the little guy! (If only I could figure out how to tap it that stream

M$ is a legitimate target of derision for foot-dragging on the multi-threading issue according to the gossip I've read -- basically Intel had to drag them into that option, but of course that's only because Intel discovered it couldn't keep torquing the single thread taproot and had to branch out, as it were.

And I don't think there's a creditable reason why we haven't long since obviated the 4GB silicon ceiling except for M$' resistance. It is a prime reason why we need all the memory headroom we can get, so I say flip them a bird or two on this issue and feel that for once you're completely justified in the eyes of the gods and all mankind!

Bruce

Actually I have been fairly successful with ViaVoice.
Things improved dramatically when I discovered the Telex M-560 microphone which seems to work better for speech with ViaVoice than anything currently available.

For what it is worth, what I look for in a speech microphone is a USB interface and the shortest possible length of (well-shielded) analog cable between the microphone element and the digitizing DSP. The biggest problem with mics (in my experience) is pickup of electrical noise. Unfortunately that very crucial dimension is usually well hidden in microphone advertising and bubble packaging so there is little alternative to trial and error. I can say that the Telex M-560 works very well indeed (I have four of them as they are getting rarer). There is probably an aftermarket in quality mics with upgraded shielding hand-installed. It is a great shame that there are no (?) ribbon mics with OEM DSP to USB. Aftermarket USB invariably involves connectors whose noise figure is unacceptable.

I was hoping that DNS 10 would be an improvement over ViaVoice. With all the hoopla over it I was a little surprised that none of the retail stores have it. Just because ViaVoice does what I need doesn't mean I don't want something better. I note that according to Nuance advertising DNS 9 is 99% accurate and DNS 10 is 20% more accurate than DNS 9. So it should be good if it is 119% accurate

At least learn your math...