This cute netbook computer has two functions: to act as
1) a dictation device and
2) an image back-up device on road trips.

When I see or hear the word "dictation" I think of a manager sitting at his desk, dictating a memo to his secretary. But I am using the word to refer to a time-saving process for creating Word files that document my road trips. With Dragon Naturally Speaking software (and microphone) I can speak and have that speech converted to text in a file.

The speech recognition software is a time saver and has remarkable---but by no means perfect---accuracy once it is "trained" to recognize one's voice. I have version 10 and intended to use that on the netbook, but found out that it does not work well (or not at all) with Windows 7, so I bought version 11 Premium, which works very well with Windows 7.

Being a two-finger typist, typing a lot is a pain, and my trip journals have lots of information to be typed. This dictation arrangement will eliminate about 85% of that typing (some typing is required to correct mistakes and enter text into table).

Trial and error has shown that version 11 does not work well with Word 97, so I dictate into WordPad, then copy it to a Word file.