Until recently, I lived in an apartment complex where neighbors bombarded me
with impossible levels of electrical appliance QRM (to the point that DXing
was difficult to impossible). About a month ago, I moved to a much better
location with much less noise, where I'm hoping to get back into the hobby.

I also now own a laptop (a Dell 4150) that I would like to use to make
digital recordings of signals I receive. The idea is to use the laptop as a
replacement for the cassette recorder I used years ago to play back weak or
hard-to-understand transmissions for digging out an ID or to hear details I
missed listening live. I'd also like to save an archive of station IDs,
interval signals, and interesting programs I pick up in digital form for
posterity. I've used the laptop while it was sitting next to the R5000
without any apparent interference problem, so I'm hoping I can use the
laptop for this purpose.

My radio is a Kenwood R5000, with a "Record" jack on the front, and my
laptop has a microphone input which hopefully I can use to get the audio
into the machine.

I'm wondering whether anyone has a similar setup. If so, is there anything I
should know about connecting the radio to the laptop, and can you recommend
recording and playback software that would allow me to listen to segments of
a recording and also edit the audio file (mostly removing the parts I don't
need to save)? The laptop is running Windows XP Home, if that makes a
difference.

Any ideas would be most appreciated.

--Larry