I am using Vista. I have been into Control Panel/Sound/Recording and all that is showing is speakers/headphones. I have right clicked and ticked both boxes to Show disabled devices and show disconnected devices. No other devices show up. Can anyone suggest what else I can try. Many thanks.
You never said what you actually wanted to do, but most people miss recording internet audio. That’s the one Vista and Win7 leave out. Koz
Not always! My five year-old Vista laptop has Stereo Mix and so does my one year old Windows 7 desktop system. I’ve seen the accepted general wisdom found here on the forum that it is getting harder to find “Stereo Mix” but haven’t yet encountered it personally.
It’s only accepted as far as the fact that most internal sound cards in Windows XP supported “Stereo Mix” (sometimes called “Mix” or “What U Hear”) whereas on Vista / Win 7 there are “a lot” of machines that do not have that option.
I don’t know the figures (what % of Vista/win 7 have stereo mix), but it is not an uncommon problem.
Stereo Mix is available on my Vista machine. I recall waxcylinder saying that it was available on one of his PCs but not on the other. From that totally unrepresentative sample we have Stereo Mix supported on 75% of Vista/Win 7 PCs, which would mean something like 100 million computers in the world without Stereo Mix 
Thanks for the replies. Yes I am trying to record a radio broadcast where I was interviewed and it is only live, on BBC i player, until Friday. Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1501, running Windows Vista Business, AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-50, 2.00 GB RAM, ATI Radeon Xpress 1150, Sound Card is Sigma Tel High Definition Audio CODEC with driver date Jan 07 and version 6.10.0.5343. I have updated the drivers but this has changed nothing. Any other help would be gratefully received. Thanks.
My one week old Tosh laptop with an onboard Realtek soundcard running Windows 7 Home editition will happily record streaming audio (it did take a bit of fissling about under the bonnet/hood - and with a bit of help from reading the Manual and the Wiki).
Mrs. Waxcylider has 2 W7 laptops her newer small netbook will perform this trick - but her older one could not be persuaded to no matter how hard we bludgeoned it.
My understanding is that it is down the the soundcard and its drivers rather than the O/S as to whether or not recording streaming audio can be made to work.
WC