Upon looking at the Microphone properties, the slider was all the way up to 100.
After considerably lowering it, Audacity is recording wonderfully again.
Thank you very much for the great tip. This advice is much appreciated.
I have recently upgraded my Dell laptop with Windows Vista OS to Windows 7. Audacity worked perfectly with Windows Vista....after upgrading to Windows 7 Audacity's recording quality is Poor (very loud and scratchy). To improve Audacity's performance, I changed the program's compatibility mode to run...