Recording guitar with laptop problem

Ok, so I’ve just bought a Line 6 Pocket POD for my guitar (don’t know if any of you are familiar with it). I’m gonna use it to record guitar playing for upcoming YouTube videos I’m gonna make. So here’s the setup: I plug my 1/4" jack cable from the guitar and in to the POD. Then I plug a 1/8" minijack cable (stereo) from the POD’s direct out/phones to my laptop’s mic input. And here’s the problem: When I tried to record with Audacity, the quality was horrible. It was OK/not very bad on a clean preset, but when I tried to play with distortion/fuzz, it sounded very strange! I don’t know how to describe it, it sounded very strange and it was also very grainy. The voume also became very low. Then i googled some, and found out that there were others having the same problem. I also found out that recording through the mic input on a laptop was a very bad option. So here’s my question: What other option do I have using my laptop? My PC doesn’t have a line in, only mic in and headphones in. I have tried to record on a very low volume, but it didn’t get any better. If I record through the line in on my father’s desktop PC instead of my laptop’s mic in, will the sound quality get any better? My father’s PC is not a very expensive PC, but not a very cheap one neither. Does the sound card need to be very good to get decent/good audio quality? What am I going to do?

Thank you in advance.
-Emil

It’s difficult to make a decent microphone input cheaply, which is why computer microphone inputs are so often horrible. It’s much easier to make a reasonable line level input, so these are usually a lot less horrible. If you have the option of using your father’s desktop PC with the line input I’d suggest that you give that a go.

Thank you for the answer.
Do you think this one will work?

http://www.vantecusa.com/en/product/view_detail/439

I’ve gotten rid of the strange noise when playing in distortion! I simply removed all the recording effects on the microphone device in control panel–>sound. However, I’ve still got the clipping sound. The clipping is reduced alot when i hold my right hand on the strings above the guitar pickups. Is it something in my room that disturbs the recording, or is it the fact that I’m using a mic input instead of a line input?