Realtek Microphone Problems

Hi guys,

I've had this problem since I built this computer. Basically, my microphone is not working at all on my PC. When I plug my mic in, Realtek detects that it is a mic and all but then it does not pick up noises. It's not like it can't really hear it, it just thinks that the mic is disabled and is turned off or something. Another strange problem is that I cannot enable or change any settings in Sound in the Control Panel. I can make the changes and then hit ok, but when I open up the window again, it's back to previous default settings. I also cannot enable Stereo Mix and I also cannot open the "Set Up Microphone" wizard as it keeps saying it cannot launch.

So, the first thing I did was download newer drivers for Realtek HD Audio Manager from the ASUS site. It uninstalled the older ones and reinstalled the new ones. Once it restarted, there was no sound and the Speaker icon in the bottom right had a red "X" on it. Windows automatically troubleshooted and found that my audio devices had encountered a problem. So to get my sound back again, I had to do a System Restore.

I'm now very confused on what to do next. Could this be a hardware problem or is there something that I'm missing out?

I've had this problem for almost 6 months and this is my last resort for getting this fixed. Toms Hardware or even my PC Guru friends can't figure it out.

Thanks

I'll give that a go and see how it works. Will post back in a few minutes.

Also, I don't have a sound card. I use 3.5mm speakers.

I have uninstalled Realtek and Windows automatically installed the HD Audio Codecs. However, I have no sound. It has the speaker icon with the Red X at the bottom. Troubleshooting says that the "Audio Device is Disabled"

I have Realtek HD Audio Codecs downloading and hopefully that will bring my sound back. If not, I will have to do a System Restore.

I fixed it! Looked up the problem with no sound and can't change settings and found a report on PC Gamer about it. Turns out all I needed to do was change the access for users to change Audio Processes. So I went into Command Prompt (ran as administrator)
and typed in:

net localgroup Administrators /add networkservice
net localgroup Administrators /add localservice

And rebooted and it worked! So happy right now, was dreading having to reinstall windows. Thanks Fireberd for the help too though, I'm almost 100% sure it wouldn't have worked had I not done what you said