StarDestroyer.Net BBS

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...

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

Seriously? The drive is barely 4 months old!

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

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?

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.