Are you going to plug a michrophone into to the microphone jack on your laptop or do you want to use the michrophone that is built in to your laptop? Just so you know, if you are using a cheap plug in michrophone the sound will not be much if any better than the laptop michrophone. If you have a higher quality michrophone then you will get better sound.
Actually I am trying to record my guitar into the software program, and I go directly into the input jack of the laptop, but the laptop wants to record from the internal mic rather than the mic input. I don't know how to change it to record from the mic line in, I have change the computer setting to use the line/mic in but it still records from the laptop mic.....very confusing. Can you advise? Thanks!
I don't think just plugging the guitar into the mic input is going to work well, however you probably need to disable the onboard microphone in the laptop BIOS and set the mic input to the default recording device.
The results you get will depend on the quality of the sound chipset - note some laptops can be noisy on the mic input if the recording level has to be set very high, similarly if you overload the mic input you will get distortion..
I would suggest you use a guitar pre-amp to feed an audio to USB converter and record via the USB - this will give you a better sound and it is easier to control the levels. Do make sure that the converter can handle the pre-amp output levels.
I just put this video up on youtube to show you in more detail how to set up this connection and give you some other ideas (at the end) to make your life a lot easier if you plan to do this often.
You can plug your guitar into a mic input, but you should definately use a transformer to match impedences. There are many high (guitar impedence) to low (mic level) plug ins for this. Or just use a direct box. I could suggest a lot of better ways, but I have no idea what you're working with. If you have an amp with a direct out, go directly to the audio input of your soundcard.