Help needed with Dragon Naturally Speaking for handicapped user

[brian]

Hi all,

Has anyone out there managed to set up Dragon Naturally Speaking to
run under WINE? I'm using Debian 7.6 multihome, with XFCE from the
Wheezy repos, which means v4.8.

My wife has developed a problem with her hands, and can't type more
than a few sentences without severe pain. I've got Dragon (V10, which
was supposed to be the most compatible) installed, but configuring it
is a problem because you have to almost yell down the microphone to
get the sound to register when training it. I can get it to work but
my wife is (much!) quieter-spoken than I am, and it just will not work
for her.

I've checked the mixer settings, I have the microphone gain boosted to
maximum. We're using a USB microphone, but I could go back to an old
PS/2 one if USB could be the problem. Her PC is a bog-standard
eMachines/Wal-Mart job, so nothing fancy, sound is off the
motherboard, no added cards. There should be enough CPU power there,
though, 2.3 GHz dual core with 3GB of RAM.

Any ideas very gratefully received, I just don't know what else to try.

Thanks,

Brian.