Problem with soundcard/voice codec?

I recently purchased an Alienware shuttle and with it came the Intel RealtekAC97 sound card. The audio sounds great, but for some reason, my microphone on Ventrilo and ingame in Counter-strike is muffled to the point of nearly zero coherency. I was wondering if anyone knows what is wrong and/or how to fix this problem, maybe something with codecs? Not too sure, hopefully someone knows!

Thanks alot.

Try enabling your microphone boost, if you haven't akready.

i did, its just all muffled. i tried updating drivers (as recent as i could find), but to no avail. thanks tho =/.