Checking your microphone

Had a client the other day who rang me up to say that his Skype call had failed because the person he was talking to couldn’t hear him. Not a very helpful state of affairs when making a phone call! Besides checking to see that Skype itself has been properly configured, the first thing to ensure is that your microphone is actually enabled and therefore available for use.

To do this in Windows, follow these steps:

1. Open Control Panel
2. Open the Sound control panel
3. Go to the Recording tab
4. Check to see if your microphone is listed and if so has a white tick against it. If not, then:
5. Right click anywhere in the blank white area of the window to display the show disabled devices context menu
6. Click on “Show disabled devices” (See below)
7. Once your microphone is visible, right click on it and click Enable.

Once you’ve confirmed that your microphone is enabled ok, then you can check it in operation by using the sound recorder to create a test recording. To do this requires the following steps:

1. Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, and then Sound Recorder.
2. Click Start Recording
3. To stop recording, click Stop Recording
4. Click the File name Box, type a name for the recording and then click Save to complete the test recording as an audio file on your computer.