How to enable audio input monitoring for Inspiron 1545

What is the operating system?

Try Instruction Set 7 in the Input Monitoring FAQ.

they could enable audio input monitoring by taking control of my laptop using something like TeamView and edit my registry themselves.

There is no Registry edit for the Inspiron 1545 model that I know of (for input monitoring), and I doubt that out-of-warranty support knows of one either.

Thanks for the fast reply Jimco.Instruction Set 7 didn't apply because there is no "Listen" tab on my mic properties page, just General, Levels, and Advanced. Regarding editing the registry, when I asked the Dell guy if that was how he was going to enable input monitoring, he replied yes. He may or may not have actually intended to do it that way. Then this afternoon I got a call from a guy claiming to be from Microsoft saying that my issue had somehow been bumped up to him. His accent was too thick and I was too preoccupied at work for me to get a clear answer about how he could resolve the issue, but he assured me that he could do so for the greatly reduced price of $79.00! I've had this laptop for over 6 years and it is so slow now that I am seriously considering replacing it in the next few months so I'm not too keen on putting any money into it. It's just that I had such a great time singing karaoke for the first time on New Year's Eve that I thought I'd rig my laptop up to do it at home. So Jimco, if you know any of the secrets tech support was trying to sell me and are willing to share them for free, I'll serenade your help.

I already shared all of my secrets for free when I wrote the FAQ. Sorry but there is no other solution that I know of for the Inspiron 1545 model.

What did you say your operating system is again?

By the way, the operating system is Windows Vista.

Windows Vista.

I wrote in the FAQ that "modern" systems have the Listen tab. That was a weasel word on my part because I was not sure if Vista had it or not. I researched yesterday for a while and could not find anything definitive, but it looks like probably Vista did not have it.

I don't think it is a function of the audio driver because my laptop with Win 7 has the Listen tab whether I use the IDT audio driver or just the Windows native audio driver.

It looks like the Inspiron 1545 falls into a doughnut hole. On the one hand its OS is not modern enough to have the Listen tab, but on the other it is too modern to be able to use the Sigmatel audio drivers for which various people had found Registry edits. (The edits depend on the specific drivers because the drivers put the entries that are edited into the Registry in the first place. That is why it is difficult to just come up with an edit for you -- one needs to have a laptop with your OS and which uses your driver version to even begin looking.)

You could use a recording program like Audacity and record the karaoke on one track, then while listening to it record yourself on another track.

Audacity also has a feature that can send the input to the output, but there is a lag by the time it gets to the output so I doubt that it would be satisfactory for karaoke.

Final idea, you can get an inexpensive little mixer and have the karaoke go through one channel while your mic signal goes through another. The output of the mixer can go to the laptop if you want to record it.