Inspiron 6000 Microphone - 'clicking' sound while recording - 4 times per second

I have a DELL Inspiron 6000 that plays sounds well (CD, DVD) through the PC speakers and through the headphones. I purchased an inexpensive Cyber Acoustics gaming headset and tried to record my voice to set up Speech recognition. Speech recognition seemd to work BUT any recordings have a continuous persistent CLICK that repeats 3 or 4 times a second. It almost sounds like a hard drive 'beat' that is always there. I also found this to be in any other mocrophone that I tried.

Ideas?