Laptop CD drive dying - please help!

[headquest]

Hi,

The CD drive in my laptop is playing up - it recognises and runs CD Roms but only stutters when I put an audio CD in.

I've tried -
- several different CDs
- running the Windows troubleshooter
- cleaning the drive tray
- checking audio interface settings (including playing other music fine from the hard drive)

Can anyone help???

Failing resurrection, can anyone recommend a good replacement (internal? or external, USB 2 or firewire, etc)

Thanks in advance

[headquest]

Okay,

the manufacturer of the laptop (Fujutsu Siemens) think that this HAS to be a hardware problem - i.e. the laser.

Because... Audio from hard disk (e.g. Window Media, Reason, Live, Tracktion, etc) is all OK, so there are no soundcard problems.

Also, this kind of glitching is apparently always a hardward issue.

So this leaves me needing a new CD drive.

Now if anyone out there cares ... perhaps you could give me your recommendations for a new CD drive.

i.e.:

should I simply replace the internal drive with a replacement from the manufacturer, of would it be better to get some kind of external drive (e.g. UBS 2.0)?

What is best for audio recording (my main preoccupation) ?

Does burn speed really matter?

What should I buy, and from where?

Sorry for appearing ignorant, but I'm not hot on hardware issues (more into software, and hardware issues are simply a bind to me!)

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the trouble to reply

[austere]

ignorance is the key to wisdom.

since it's a laptop it might be wise to go with the replacement of the manufacturer. This because laptop’s should have components that fit with each other to prolong battery life and stimulate optimal performance. In most cases the manufacturer has put in some thought to which components to use. Then again most laptops are designed for general (office) purpose and not for heavy duty audio editing. To be honest I cant really give you any real advice on it.

If you are going for a cd-rom /cd-rom burner combination please be aware of the following things:
First of all when you use your burner as your main cd-rom drive it will not last as long as when you use a separate cd-rom drive to read your cds and the burner only to burn things. I know that can be sort of difficult with laptops so an external drive could be useful to solve that problem. It would, however require you to carry around your external device when you want to use it. Nice part is that you can also hook it up to other systems and use it there. For example to burn some tracks at friends place. Though I don’t know this for sure I can imagine that an external device will have a higher battery drain than an internal device.

Combi’s often give lesser quality results when it comes to extracting audio from CDs. Lesser quality in this case means longer ripping times and more sensitive to errors.

Burning speed. The lower the speed the better! Burning at high speeds will cause errors, glitches on the cd. Most of these are compensated for with error-correction that’s also written on the CD but the higher the speed the more likely it is that you will hear glitches during play-back of audio cds. Also, an high number of errors on both audio & data cds will contribute to the loss of material. Meaning that the chances are increased that your cdr will become unreadable. This also depends greatly on what brand of CDR’s you’ve used, ofcourse.

Please be aware that I am no expert and all this is just based upon my personal experience. I do hope you will find some use in what I said.


Ps. Sorry for looking so pretentious.

[headquest]

Please be aware that I am no expert and all this is just based upon my personal experience. I do hope you will find some use in what I said.

Definitely - that's very helpful, thanks. So I have a few more things to think about which will help me decide...

Having read your post I think I might consider getting the manufacturer's replacement to fit in the laptop and getting an external device. I think these are mostly self-powered, rather than bus powered, so not a problem in terms of battery life.

That said, I will have to think through which drive I then use for which task (i.e. playing/ripping, and burning). Again, pros and cons I should think...

Thanks again