I have a Vulcan PC with a VIA AC'97 sound card. I have tried to plug an external microphone into it but it doesn't work. The microphone was perfectly OK on another PC. My speakers work. What I would like to know is how can I find out whether it's my sound card that is faulty or whether there is some driver/software error on my PC, which is preventing the mic to work. Is there a piece of software or website I can run which will assess my sound card (similar to those that tell my system configuration, etc). I have checked the sound and microphone properties through control panel and they seem OK but when I do a microphone sound test, the PC doesn't pick up any input/my voice.

Hello simonecas,

Welcome to PCHF.

All the tests you can do are best done manually. It's possible it could be your card. You have ruled out your microphone. You have also pritty much ruled out a codec problem since you can play sound but can't record it. Time to test your software. Can you follow these instructions:

- Go to Control Panel, Sounds and Audio Devices.
- Click on the Audio tab, and make sure you have an appropriate device selected for "Sound Recording".
- Click on the Volume button. Make sure either "Microphone" or "Stereo Mix" has a tick in the Selected checkbox.

Thanks for your help. No, sadly everything seems ok and I'm told the devices work properly but they don't. We went through the configure/setup microphone testing several times using all sort of setups but we never get anything. Could there be a problem with the soundcard or the connection to it is loose or damaged? Is it the kind of thing that I can check/fix by unscrewing the case which I had before on another computer. The guarantee is def. expired.

AC97's tend to be onboard. Do you have a line-in port you can test to see if it's a physical port problem?

Hi Simonecas,

Forgive me if this sounds patronising but is the mic plugged into the pink jack as the blue is for an auxiliary output device e.g. amp.
What Motherboard do you have so I can look up the drivers for you.

I changed to test the line-in and that didn't work either, but the speaker output does work. So only 1 out of three 'jacks' off the soundcard appears to work. To me that seemed strange.