microphone issues

I have been trying to get my mic to work, I thought it was broken and bought a new one only to find the same problem. I did have it working at one time but some how have lost whatever it is that makes it work.
I have checked the help files in windows and after much digging it came back that i needed voice recognition on my speech icon in order to have a mic work, so I looked up how to get speech recognition working if it was not installed which it was not, and it gave me two options , both basically involving Microsoft word. It tells me to find it in add / remove in control panel and find Microsoft word and chose change. therein lies my dilemma, I have no Microsoft word installed that I can find, Is this the only way I can have a mic work on my computer? and if not what can I do to make it work?

 

It depends what you want the microphone for. I know nothing about voice recognition, but if it's just for recording voice straight to the computer, there are plenty of ways to achieve this. One bit of software that allows you to record to the computer is Audacity. There are various input settings, and one will be for a microhone. Once you've recorded something, and depending on the kind of microphone and soundcard, you may have to amplify the sound so you can hear it when it plays back.

 

Thank you for the help, I used driver dective and found my sound card drivers to be out of date, fixing that fixed the problem. Driver detect also helped me update a lot of other drivers out of date, so I was helped in many ways.