I’ve tried recording sound on my Dell Inspiron 4100, but what it records is only snippets–I’ve done “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” a Bing Crosby outtake and “Hopalong Molotov” (long story). How would one get the computer to record, say, 40 to 45 minutes?
What application are you using to record the sound?
If you haven’t tried it already, I recommend Audacity - it’s a free, open-source audio recording and editing tool and it’s really good. It will record pretty much as long as your hard drive space will permit.
Quicktime (big blue “Q.”)
I’m actually looking for the application that will allow me to 1) Record stuff on the hard drive, on which I have 24 gigabytes available; and 2) Record from that to an iPod or similar device.
Audacity will do that (a friend of mine used it to record whole 24-hour broadcast archives from a community radio station we were running) - and it can export in a variety of formats (Ogg, MP3, FLAC, WAV if you really want)
I thank those who posted to refer me to Audacity; I’ve downloaded it. 
The problem I have now is getting the volume high enough to hear. Do you turn the Speaker control to Low and the Microphone control to High? I wonder whether that’s what I’ll have to do to get audible sound…
There should be a dropdown box underneath the volume controls in Audacity - that should allow you to select ‘microphone’ as the recording source - then if you click the little downward-pointing arrow right next to the microphone icon, and select ‘monitor input’, it should show you meter bars that display the level of the sound - speak into the microphone while adjusting the slider - you want the meter to be fluctuating somewhere in the middle of the range - and certainly not topping out for louder sounds.
If you turn the speaker control right down, you won’t be able to hear your recorded sounds when you play them back - so I’d leave that one alone. If you’re hearing the microphone’s input through the speakers as you record, it may be necessary to go into your sound card’s properties and tell it to exclude the microphone input from the mixed sound.