Hello all,

I have a 2-year-old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop with about 60 gig of RAM. Recently I have been having trouble when I TRY to play CDs or DVDs. When I press 'play' in either iTunes or PowerDVD, the drive starts making an unusual 'working' noise, my computer begins to act very slowly, and the song or movie plays choppy (it usually plays uninterrupted for no more than 2-3 seconds before stopping and 'chugging' for a while). In addition, when I play a CD through iTunes, the songs have an unusual static hiss in the background which is not present when I play the CD in an external CD player. When I try to rip the CD to my computer through iTunes, it RUNS EXTREMELY slowly, importing at a rate between 0.1 and 0.5 times the duration of the song (compared to the normal rate of 10-15 times). When the songs finally do import, they retain the same static hiss which was present when I played the CD through iTunes.

I know that the problem is with my drive and not with iTunes, because iTunes plays the songs I have already imported like normal, and PowerDVD is also affected by this problem.

It may be of use to NOTE that I have recently been attempting to view a DVD with a region code of 2 from England, so I downloaded a program called 'DVDGenie' which can switch between region codes an unlimited number of times. I'm not sure if this had any effect on the drive. I have since uninstalled this program, but the problem persists.

If anyone has experienced this problem, or has any possible ideas for solutions, I would be greatly appreciative.

Thanks a bunch,

Ben8600:

Try USING a can of condensed air to blow out any debris from inside the DVD drive. If that doesn't work, try different CDs to see if they work, and try to use different programs to play the CDs (for example, try to play a different music CD with Windows Media Player).

If that doesn't work, try REPLACING the DVD drive with one you know works.

Doc