Last summer I dabbled a bit with sound recording, using my PC and my laptop. A thing that was disturbing me, was the high noise level of the input channel.

The best signal-to-noise ratio that I could get was about 30db on the PC, 36db with the laptop. Plenty of noise, I felt that the input channels are unusable this way.

Using a preamp helped since the microphone alone just didn't deliver enough signal level, but even then the noise levels were disturbing high.

Are those PC/laptop sound input channels generally this bad? Is there something I can do without spending a lot of money?