Background noise and hissing

[EnglishBob]

My laptop is an Dell Inspiron 1525 and the headset is a Logitech ClearChat stereo. However when I record my voice and play it back I can not only hear the laptop fan in the back ground but I also hear hissing. My voice is not clear on playback and is obscurred by the 'white noise' in the background. Also I cannot activate any of the effects to cancel background noise. I have tried selecting the recording but the effects are still greyed out ?

[steve]

Is this a USB microphone?

I have tried selecting the recording but the effects are still greyed out ?

Effects are only available when Audacity is Stopped. They are not available during Play, Record or Pause.

[EnglishBob]

No its not USB

[steve]

Check in the sound cards control panel that you have the microphone selected as the recording input and not "stereo in".

Note that most general purpose sound cards have rubbish quality microphone inputs - that's why many users either use a microphone pre-amp and plug that into the line input of their sound card, or use a USB sound card with a proper microphone input.