About a year and a bit ago I had a issues with Vista and my Microphones. I do a lot of stuff with the Microphone and my computer, and this was a huge issue! Why on earth could I not get the microphone to work In Vista! Within Vista, there was no way to get the microphone audio to play through the speakers. It always seemed muted. How could I un-mute the microphone?
Luckily within a few days of posting the Vista Microphone issue, hundreds of people started posting their solutions to the problem. The main issue was that the Microphone Line Monitor in the sound control panel was nowhere to be seen. Therefore, by default as Vista mutes the line, there was no way to turn it on.
If your soundcard uses the Sigmatel Audio Codec, you are in huge luck as there is a simple way to enable the Microphone on vista with a simple registry hack.
Simply go to your start menu and type in regedit and hit enter to get into the Vista Windows Registry
Next you are going to want to find the following folder:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E96C-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000\Settings\filter\SpeakerHp\
Then you're going to find the key: EnableIntSpkrMute
Change this key from 01, to 00.
Reboot Vista, and you are ready to go! Next time you go into your sound control panel, you will have the ability to un-mute, and change your microphone levels in Vista!
Hope this helps everyone out there with what I have found to be the most annoying issue in Vista out there. Who knows what made them decided to lock out the Microphone from 90% of the people out there, but at least now you can resolve the issue pretty easily!
Of course if you don't want to go into the registry to fix your Vista Microphone issue, simply download this Reg file, and run it on your machine, then reboot. Simple. Enjoy your microphone!