I have been trying to enter some sightings using voice recognition and the program has crashed 3 different times. It happens when Petey doesn't seem to understand the bird name, he stops listening, so I click on his reactive icon to wake him (reset him?) and a window comes up with:

BDV 35

Run-time error 

1-2147418113 (800ffff)

Catastropic failure!!

and the program shuts down- all my entries are lost.  What does Petey have against me? How can this be prevented?

Green Heron

Hello,

Very sorry for the problem.

Tell me about your system please. (Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties)

1. What OS? (e.g. XP, ME, 2000, etc)
2. How much memory? (128, 256, 512, etc)
3. How fast is your CPU (e.g. 1GHz, etc)

Has voice sightings input ever worked for you on this system?

A couple things come to mind:

1. This has not worked before and your system is under-configured to run Petey - he requires a lot of memory and cpu power.
2. You system is powerful enough, yet something has corrupted the MSagent/Petey files. In that case, go to http://www.microsoft.com/msagent and preform the Complete Download & Install.

Please let me know on all of this,

Jeff

Jeff,

I reinstalled msagent and the program worked much better for a while.... 

Now I am having a major problem entering bird sitings! (also still crashes occasionally trying to get Pety to work) It confirms my birds are entered but when I check the sitings list only several of them are there.  I reenter sitings both using checklist/and voice recognition, it confirms and when I search --- they're NOT there. I went back and looked for certain other birds I had entered earlier and some of them are also missing.

Do I need to update my lists? I'm also running Dragon Naturally Speaking on this computer. Could there be a conflict?

I am very discouraged with the amount of time I've spent trying to get this program to work correctly and then to have the birds I enter not register....... HELP

Sandy

Hello Sandy,

Very sorry for the issues you are experiencing.

I would suspect conflicts between Dragon and MSagent-Petey. MSagent is a product of Microsoft. You should use the web site mentioned above to test this. If it is not working it will not have anything to do with Birders Diary. In addition, you should also test using the Control Panel -- Speech functionality. This also thoroughly tests the MSagent.

As for your lost sightings issues, I am certain that this is just a usage misunderstanding. Please try to reproduce this issue and give me all the exact details and steps you take. How you are entering sightings (checklist or keyboard methods). How you check to see the sightings.

If I were guessing, I would say that you are probably entering and saving the sightings just fine, but that you are not using the correct settings when going into View/Edit to view the sightings.

Let me know,

Jeff

You are right! I did enter them, several times.. but they don't show up under View/Edit. I found them through Reports, under Rhode Island, but they are unavailable in View/Edit. For example, I have searched for Virginia Rail by location, date, and bird (all separately) but it doesn't show in edit window yet it shows in state report.  Most of the other birds, but not all, I entered at the same time show in View/Edit window.

How am I going to edit the duplicate entries if they don't show up in View window? What am I doing wrong?

 I think I figured it out. By not deleting stuff in View/edit window but using reset button the missing birds appeared. Now I should be able to remove the duplicates. 

Sandy