Many modern laptops share one 1/8 inc input that allow for either a ( mono ) microphone or stereo line in. Are you certain that your input jack is mono ?

That said, the quality of most internal soundcards is usually fair at best. You can improve performance by adding generic ASIO drivers, such as the freeware ASIO4all. This will drastically improve latency, but will not address other low end soundcard issues like high noise floor and distortion levels.

If you have a PCMCIA slot ( or a free USB port ) you might consider adding an external soundcard that has at minimum stereo inputs, uses ASIO drivers, and can record at 24 / 96 if you want higher quality recordings ( the minimum would be 16 bit 44 khz ). Creative's Audigy, at the low end of the scale, should do a decent job here. A bit higher up the ladder would be the M Audio or Echo cards, which are made strictly for the purpose of recording music / audio.

I found for myself that I could fill up the three USB ports on my computer without any noticeable degradation in performance. I have a mouse, an external hard drive, a USB soundcard, and a synth that all work on USB ( for midi in and out ), giving me the need for 4 slots. Once I added an external USB hub, I noticed a serious performance drop off.

So.. I dropped the Soundcard for now and instead I use an external digital recorder, the Zoom H4. I am quite satisfied with it's performance, and it can also double as an external soundcard for the laptop. It can record in both WAV and MP3 formats. Now I only use the computer as a host for my VST synth and effects and as an external midi sequencer / beat box. Those tasks alone take up enough power that I will probably keep my setup like this, as some of the VST's are a bit CPU hungry. If I wanted to replace the USB soundcard though, I'd likely go with an M-Audio PCMCIA based card. I used Sonar as my internal recording app, but Audacity is an excellent free program that can yield quite good results.

Regards,
AJ


[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 04-15-2007).]