Any help please with microphone setup??

I am trying to get the microphone to work on my Xp PC so that I can use Skype.
I know the mic is OK and when I shout into the recorder I can just hear a tiny bee sound playing back. I have dug around the file/properties/format conversion and messed about and got the bee sound slightly louder, but I might be imagining it.

I have gone into Control Panel/Speech/ where there is only a text to speech tab - is that OK? The 'help' center suggests there should be a speech recognition tab here but there is none.??[:confused]

Anyone suggest a likely remedy?.

Thanks - geek beginner

 

some more info:

Volume Control>Recording control - cannot tick 'select' on CD Player, Line in, or mic. Volume on max everywhere, Mic boost tik'd

Microphone is Logitech headphone set [mute off. volume up] plugged into pink [red] and green socket on Motherboard [?].

Could the problem be a multicamera surveillance system with 4 mic. inputs?

ACPI Multiprocessor
Win. XP Pro
Intel pentium 4 CPU 3.00Ghz [x2]
1Gb of RAM

Realtek AC97 Audio

Does any of this help?

 

iam not sure if this will help but i got my speech recogination through opera the web browser it comes with all the features its been working pretty well for me its in the techology are hope this helps...

 

thanks bsibbling.

After trying various help pages and even Microsoft without success, we fitted a sound blastercard which has got the mic working. Would still like to know if the prob was down to Geovison Multicam system though. UK Geovison support say not.
regards