I’ve decided to give Skype a go. But I’m not so sure I want to wear a full headset when I use the “phone” so I thought it would be a good idea to use my cell phone earbud instead with it.
It wasn’t exactly obvious where to find this but I should really have known to just try Radio Shack in the first place. Thanks to Joel Ross for finding and posting a link to this little gadget that allows you to plug a standard cell phone headset into the 3/32″ jack at one end and has two 1/8″ plugs at the other to plug into your PC’s Microphone and Speaker jacks.
Note: Radio Shack sometimes changes things around a bit. If you end up at an index page just do a search for part 42-2428.
By the way, if you are using an older Thinkpad you may find you have some issues with this or any other headset/mic combination. Apparently earlier Thinkpads require some sort of gadget inline with the mic in order to work, do a find on Google for 600E microphone. Here is one of the results that helped me.
When I was in Radio Shack to purchase the headset Y-cable one of the employees warned me that somebody else had already tried and it didn’t work. He suggested getting one of their headphones instead. I didn’t argue with him at the time but this didn’t make any sense at all. The next time I’m in I’ll let him know that his other customer simply didn’t do enough homework (and probably came back later to return the headset he’d purchased as well…).