Vista - Yet Another Microphone Issue with Vista

Greetings and salutations;

I too have/had issue with the microphone not working with Vista 32bit (sorry am a slummer, not good enough for x64, I guess). To help with my issue I have attached the system info of my machine via the program that one of your wonderful contributors made.

History, I bought my Acer 2.24gig machine with Vista Home Premium 32bit a year and a half ago.

When I brought it home, I transferred the headset (headset/mic combo) from my XP machine so I could continue my online gaming, except that the microphone did not work. Frustrated me and after doing some online research I found that my onborad sound didn't cut the mustard with Vista (hello, why issue a piece of internal equipment that won't work with the OS?). It didn't matter what I tried, I could not get the microphone to work, especially since Vista was insisting that the microphone be configured through the Speech Recognition setup, something I don't use. No matter what I tried I could still not get the sound bar to show any sign of movement as I repeated over and over again the "Peter dictates to his computer." blurb.

Eventually I read online that the onboard sound needed to be amplified, ie I needed to install a soundcard. On the sly I purchased a Creative Audigy SE and I had to jump through hoops to get the card to work because the Creative drivers blew chunks at the time, like apparently all drivers for Vista did. Eventually I was able to get a driver that worked. Sort of. The headset mic finally worked (I bought and took back three different headsets as well) even though the microphone setup via the Voice Recognition did not (no movement on the sound bar).

So what happened? Strangely enough, I simply moved my computer to the TV room to play some COD4 on the widescreen/flat screen. When I tried the headset, no joy. Back to square one.

I went to Creative and got the latest drivers and still nothing. From my research online, including reading most of the threads here that related to "creative" and "microphone", none of the suggestions found worked. My online buddy has been trying to persuade me to upgrade my machine to XP but I would rather Vista worked.

So, does anyone have suggestions? Or better yet a true honest to goodness fix?

Thanks for listening.

Albert - Pariahsolo