Mic advanced tab is greyed out

[jseber1982]

Ok this is a weird question. On my wifes pos hewlett packard, it has integrated sound. When i have the mic unmuted view clicking the speaker at the bottom right, i can hear myself through the mic. When i try to use a program,, the program does not pick the mic up.. so i went in the control panel and went to sound, clicked on the mic input tab,, the advanced is greyed out, so i click volume on there,, and the mic is muted, and can not be unmuted,,but yet when i click the speaker in the systray, it is unmuted. Even with the db gain, no program can pick the mic up even though i can hear myself through the speakers...
...so i put a soundblaster audigy in the system,,, same thing happens, it is muted in the mic properties from the control panel, but unmuted from the sys tray.

Something else kinda weird,,, i looked in the bios to see if i could disable the onboard sound,, i could, so i disabled it... i rebooted the pc,, and then in the bios it didnt even have the soundcard on there anymore. Nothing about the soundcard, not even an option to enable or disable it.

 

[Nubius]

You did right in disabling your onboard sound. You definitely need to do that. Your sound card won't be present in the BIOS so don't look for it there. So just disable onboard sound, make sure the drivers for your onboard sound are also removed. Reinstall your new soundcard which doesn't show up in the BIOS so don't look in there for it. Re-install the drivers for the new soundcard. Now...there are a couple places you can change the mic from.

Double click the Speaker icon. Then above MASTER VOLUME click OPTIONS. Then go to Properties. Then in there make sure you have the RECORDING radio button selected. Now in there you should see boxes that can be checked. Make sure that the line in and microphone box is checked. Now make sure that on the PLAYBACK radio button that line in and microphone are selected there too. This should make it so that both of those are visible when you double click the speaker icon. Usually by default it's set to mute from there, so then you can uncheck the Mute box and hopefully everything works. Let me know if that helped any