Thanks in advance for your help.
Background: My headset has been working fine with this computer in the past. At some point in the past few months the microphone stopped working and people started complaining that they couldn't hear me well - it was at this point I realized that windows was defaulting to my webcam internal mic instead of using my headset mic which led me to investigate what happened/broke.
Problem: My headset's microphone is not "seen" by my laptop. It's not an available microphone in the system recording options, only the internal mic (part of the webcam) and system stereo sound are available as recording devices.
Things I've ruled out:
1) I've got a headset that I use regularly with my smartphone - both speakers and microphone work great, so we can rule out hardware issues related to my headset.
2) Driver issues - I've installed each separate type of drivers found on the HP website, finally starting and then settling back on the lastest version. None of the driver versions solved this issue. Drivers I tried: 6.0.1.8248 Rev.B, 6.0.1.8273 Rev.B, 6.0.1.8437 Rev.C.
I'm at a loss. I just head to be able to use my headset for video calls, but of course if windows can't even see the recording device then no other software (Google Hangouts, Skype, etc.) is going to see this mic. I'm basically forced to use the internal mic on the laptop lid that's part of the webcam and it's... terrible compared to my headset mic.
Any ideas?