Noooo!!! Don't waste the chicken! Barbeque it, instead! Gosh, man... have you no humanity??????
Two things pop into mind (it's been a long day administering the TAKS tests to the kdidies, today, so their brains and mine are both about mush!):
1. does your laptop have a LINE IN to go along with the MIC IN? The levels coming out of the scanner are bound to be too hot for the MIC IN, even at the lowest setting of the speaker output.
2. Might be getting some additional distortion due to impedance mismatch. Assuming the speaker output is 8 ohms, the LINE IN should be about 600 ohm, and the MIC IN is likely to be about 10K ohms. An audio step up transformer (8 to 600 ohms) might work if you can find that LINE IN jack. Radio Shack has some that should work.
Back in the early days of PSK31 when a lot of folks decided they wanted to try that "new" mode, they just plugged the speaker into the mic jack on the sound card with predictable results. Most have found the need for an impedance match, and I think that's going to be one of the answers for you, as well.
No, the laptop just has a mic input. In the Windows microphone settings, however, I turned the microphone boost down to zero, after which I can put the scanner output volume mid-range without any clipping. Before that, I had to turn the scanner output down to almost zero to avoid overdriving. The agwge o-scope plot of the noise does not get maxed out, and during transmissions the scope magnitude is about half of the range. I suspect that instead of making 2 hardware ports, they just made the microphone amplifier software-controlled.
Maybe the step-up transformer would help. I'm not familiar with those, though.