Using Microphone with Windows 7

Hello all,

I am taking Arabic 101 and the class requires me to use a headset to record myself speaking for my professor to listen to. I purchased a set of Turtle Beach Earforce Z1s for this purpose. When I plug them into my Dell Inspiron laptop Windows 7 recognizes that an external microphone has been plugged in, but it is not receiving any audio. I have played with its settings with no avail. I did some searching online and only found solutions for very basic things like setting it as the default or enabling it if it is disabled. The next logical step would be to assume that the headset is faulty but when I reboot the Inspiron into Ubuntu 11.10 the microphone works perfectly which shows it is not a hardware issue. This would imply that something on my Windows Installation is interfering with the functionality of the microphone and I am unable to determine what it could be. The drive is the IDT driver that came installed on my laptop, I have searched for updates but my driver is current. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Paul