Static noise on my earphones

Hi,

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro P-300 and recently I've been noticing some static noise on my earphones.

The first time I noticed it was after a night that I kept it on for quite some time and it got hotter than usual. Because it was mainly an issue with the earphones I thought it might have something to do with the connection to the jack (the internal speakers also had some issues if you gave it the beans but at a regular level they were basically fine).

Just to clarify, my earphones work perfectly fine with my iPod and with my Mac and I also tried with another set of earphones and the noise was still there.

So yesterday I got an external SoundBlaster and an air duster spray. I installed the sound card and cleaned everything a bit and the noise seemed to go away (or maybe it was the improvement in quality that made me forget about the noise). But this morning the noise came back. I messed around with the control panel a bit and uninstalled the K-Lite Codec pack that I had installed around the same time the noise started but the noise was still there.

So my theory is that it's either some issue with the software that I can't manage to find or it's the hardware overheating and that's why I saw improvement with the spray.

I'll try today being even more thorough with the spray and see if I can get it back but apart from that I can't think of anything else today.

Any ideas? Anybody else got the same problem?