Vista - Microphone/Guitar Jack Not working

I bought a brand new:

Acer 9550
ATI radeon HD 3650 graphics
Amd phenom x4 quad-core processor
4 gb ddr2 memory
640 gb sata hard drive
super multi drive
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On my old computer I've used cool edit 2.0 to record songs and such. Call me crazy but I thought buying a new computer, I could still use that program. The problem is I cannot use my microphone...or my guitar (both requiring an adapter plug to put in the computer). I have a RealTek soundcard and the newest drivers installed.
After looking through pages and pages of people with mic problems I still could not find one with my unique situation. I have a few questions.
I've managed to get some sound out of my mic but only from one side/or channel. (my left ear). That was from pluggin the mic in red jack in the back of my comp. how can i get it so it will come out of both right AND left? maybe this computer won't recognize this microphone since it wasn't really designed for the computer. if so...why on earth would my old computer recognize it? That's the thing too. My computer has no problem recognizing the mic or guitar. Says it's working actually. lol (sadly i actually truly laughed out loud) I'm just getting tired and am in desperate need of answers. Any suggestions or questions would be much appreciated. I'm too tired to go into more detail with what i've done trying to solve this. heh. Thanks for reading

-Adam

Hi, depp_x, and welcome to the forums.

I noticed you said you got *some* sound using the jack in the back - assuming the red is a light red, I beleive that is the line in jack - and thus the sound would be (naturally) low level as it is used for line in.

Now, are you using the front panel jacks? Another poster here went around and around in circles trying to figure out why he could not get the mic working- and it came down to a small setting in the RealTek drivers - disabling the Automatic jack detection on the front panel.

See if this helps you.

No. Unfortunately disabling the front line jack did nothing. However, I've been finding some more people with problems that FINALLY sound like mine. One guy said something like "well, you always record in mono and it's up to you to mix it to stereo.: (I'm using cool edit pro 2.0 by the way). It just sucks because my old computer with xp had no problem with my mic. I could visually see two channels being recorded as i'm speaking/playing guitar. I just think its a huge pain in the ass having to mix EVERY track i have to make it sound like stereo. Whereas it came out as stereo or "two channels" by default on my old comp. Thanks for the suggestion johngalt. Hopefully I can get some more possible solutions.

-Adam

Since this is not physically the same computer, perhaps you should take a closer look at the hardware on the old computer....and how it is set up in the device manager....