No problem it's hard to tell what level of experience a person has on a forum.
UBUNTU (I fat figered the name on the previous post) is a Linux OS. It can be downloaded and burned to a CD and you can run it without installing anything on your PC. Doing this helps to separate software and hardware problems because it uses a different OS and different drivers.
Do a search for it on the internet and you will find all the information you need on how to download it and create a CD.
If you have access to another PC you might want to try the two cameras on it to make sure they are not bad. First one worked for a while and the mic still works, the second does not and never worked COULD be an out of box failure. This would be the easist way to...