Not recognizing internal microphone

[eji]

My iBook G3/500 (10.3.4) isn't recognizing my internal mic.

I was trying to tinker with the new voice notes feature in Office 2004 when I realized that the "device" field was greyed out. I naturally went into the Sound pane in System Prefs to investigate, only to find that it read "No input devices found." Eh? What gives? It worked fine not long ago.

Can anyone recommend anything?

 

[eji]

Update:

I just found this through a Google search on http://www.macintouch.com/panreader35.html

"Jack Niedentha

I have a first generation white iBook [2001]. Many of us with this model experienced a loss of internal microphone after updating to sys 10.3.4. You can read about this on what is now becoming a long thread on the iBook Apple Discussion board here: Topic: Crazy problem with Internal Microphone

I was wondering if anyone might have a permanent fix [there are a few temporary ones] for this as your readership is quite wide. Here is a basic statement of the problem [partly from the original post on the iBook discussion board]:


I updated to OS X 10.3.4. After restarting a few days ago, I found that in my iChat AV, the Audio menu was missing. I didn't think much of it, but after looking at the Sound preference panel to see if Input was accidentally disabled, I saw that "No input devices found" even though just a few days before I was audio chatting with a friend. I have no idea what happened and restarting doesn't seem to help. I can't seem to figure out why my internal microphone disappeared."

Will check out the discussion he mentions here http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?14@69.bIaWafnnqz3.1@.689449b1