External mic not detected by the system

Hello. Did the mic work okay until you updated 7 and re-installed drivers, or was it not working before that?

Some Dell laptops have software named "Dell Audio Manager". Don't know if your model has it, but check for it, and if you find it then click on the "microphone" tab at the top of the main screen and see if it offers an option for the external mic jack.

Thank you for your reply.

This laptop always had Win7.

I tried to use an external mic and it never worked. I reinstalled the audio drivers to try to fix the problem, but it remains.

The Dell Audio is like this in the "microphone" section ("Improvement of Conexant Microphone"):

The Advanced tab it's like this ("Microphone" / "Line Entry"):

Whatever I choose, the result is always the same. Looks like it was disabled in the sound board...

Before I keep killing my brain cells with this issue, is this cable compatible with the mic connector in the laptop?

If Dell's documentation for the Inspiron 15R 5520 is correct, then that is the correct type of plug for the mic jack socket.

I don't think the 5520 has any setting in the BIOS that would affect the external mic, but you might want to look anyway.

No, there is nothing in the BIOS related with external mic...

The only other thing I can think to suggest is to try all of the available Conexant drivers and see if one of them gives better results.You can see all of the available drivers on the Inspiron 15R 5520 html page. You should remove all existing Conexant driver files before installing an older version of the driver. To do that:

1. Open the Device Manager (find it in the Control Panel, or type devmgmt.msc into the search box).
2. Expand the "Sound, Video & Game Controllers" section.
3. Right click on Conexant.
4. Click "uninstall."
5. Put a check mark in the option to delete the driver software, and then ok.
6. Restart the laptop. Because you removed the Conexant driver files, Windows will install its native audio driver, named "High Definition Audio Device".
7. Go back to the Device Manager and look for "High Definition Audio Device". If you see Conexant again, that means that there was another version of the Conexant driver on your hard drive, and Windows found and installed it. So  keep uninstalling & restarting until Conexant no longer appears under Sound...Controllers and "High Definition Audio Device" appears in its place.

At that point you can install an older Conexant driver. I would start with the oldest one, then you can install a newer one over that without going through the removal process again. Note that you can try the mic while the "High Definition Audio Device" (Windows generic audio driver) is in place, but the generic driver usually does not support the external mic.

I followed your instructions and realized the system detects the external mic when using only the native drivers:

After reinstalling the Conexant drivers the external mic disappears again.

I will uninstall Conexant drivers and I'll see what happens.

The Windows native audio driver normally does not support the external mic jack, so I would be surprised if it worked with the native driver. However, there might be a newer version of the native driver that does support external mic, that I don't know about yet.