Hemlock Has More Fucking Computer Problems (CDs, this time!)

[HemlockGrey]

So, 'nother problem w/ my laptop. In conjunction w/ tech-support e-mails and such, I present my problem to the brilliant technical minds of this board.

Right, now that I'm done with the shameless ass-kissery...

My CD-ROM/CD-R/DVD-RW drive is fucking up. It plays DVDs fine, but it refuses to play all types of games. I put in Half-life, Medieval, Warcraft 3, Call of Duty...sometimes it reads them, but the computer freezes when I try to open them up from "My Computer", and the only one it's autorun was Half Life (and even then, when I tried to play, it "could not detect disk", even though it had just installed it fine!). Also, there are some odd "whirring noises" when I play any type of disk. Like I said, DVDs are no prob, but CDs just will not play. Crashes all the time, half the time it doesn't even read the CD...very annoying.

Thoughts? Do I just need to update the drivers? Is it a hardware problem(Whirring noise...)? Nothing appears to be wrong with the drive itself that I can see...

[phongn]

Your drive may be dying. Unfortunately, the copy-protection mechanisms used on most games nowadays is rather harsh on the drive.

[HemlockGrey]

Seriously? The drive is barely 4 months old!

[phongn]

Stuff will typically die fast or when they're old.

[HemlockGrey]

I really don't think it's that...like I said, not only is the drive new, but audio CDs and DVDs work like a charm.

I did a system restore. Then I tried uninstalling the drivers. When I rebooted windows, it installed them automatically. Still not workin'.

Any possible thoughts?

[phongn]

Most game CDs are deliberately designed way out of spec to make them harder to copy. Audio CDs and DVDs rarely have such protection mechanisms on them.