I'm not sure if there is a solution to my problem, but I sure hope there is.
I have developed rheumatoid arthritis in my hands, and typing can be very painful. So, I have purchased a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is surprisingly good voice recognition software.
I am writing this post with it. But I usually do not use it due to the problem, which is that the jack of the headset's microphone begins to have loose contact in the sound card's receptacle.
With the poor contact, the software either has trouble recognizing my words or, as is most often the case, doesn't pick up any sound. Sometimes I can fix this by spinning the headset's jack in the receptacle until better contact is made. But this almost always requires that I reset the software's fine tuning of my soundcard or can still produce unexpected "translations" of my dictations.
I actually have had this jack/receptacle problem with other sound cards. It seems anytime I use one of the receptacles very frequently I begin trouble making good contact between the jack and receptacle.
Is this a common problem? Is there a cheaper solution other than buying new sound cards all the time?
-- Jason