Noisy CD/DVD Combo (Desperate)

Jimmy,

If your CDs and DVD are noisy, they may be a little out of spin. To fix this, try taking a wood pencil and holding it horizontally, and the CD vertically, rub sides of the wood pencil against the outside of the CD to help remove anything causing the problem.

Also, just for kicks open up your device manager, go to the CD/DVD drive and look around in there, try changing the drive from DMA mode to PIO mode. See if that helps, if not its probably better to keep it on DMA mode

To copy DVDs to your hard drive, use a piece of software called DVD Toolbox, a free piece of software from VSO Software (www.vso-software.fr). This software will get past copyright protection on 5 layer DVD and make perfect copies on your desktop. Newer 9 layer DVDs are highly compressed and you will see noticalbe picture quality degradation, to get anywhere near original copies you have to use software such as DVD X Copy, and that is serious dollars.

What DVD software are you using? I've noteiced more CD activity with WinDVD as opposed to Power DVD. --> Parallaxtech@earthlink.net

If you're talking about copying a DVD movie to the HDD then you're unlikely to get any performance increase. In any case you'll need to create a virtual DVD to do this. If you're talking copying DVD data to the HDD then yes you'll benefit from faster access.

Sometimes the noise can be caused by poor quality housings through which the noise resonates. If you're reading data it may be possible to reduce the read speed and therefore the noise. Im sure there are some utilities that will do this for you but the details escape me. If I find some I'll re-post.

Is this mechanical noise from the combo drive?

Or is there noise and other errors in the audio and video?

CD drives for laptops are not as massive as desktop drives. Therefore, an unbalanced disk can move around a bit more than on a desktop system.

As far as electrical / playback issues, some of the problems have to do with the fact that both audio and video are more dependant on software decoding and use more system resources than on a desktop system.
Even with the file on your hard drive, you will still have poorer performance on a laptop than on a desktop system.

What to do:
First, add more RAM and dedicate more RAM to the video system.

Shutdown as many background applications as possible. Every icon in the system tray represents system resources that are being used.

I noticed that the newer M2 models use Nvidia 5200 based graphics rather than the Trident video system in the M1. The Trident system may be too slow for some applications.

Chas

I dunno about the wood pencil trick. I just wipe off mine with a cloth but I cant see lint and dust causing major problems except for reading/writing. Wobble/vibration is a major cause for concern. Disk wobbling can crack the disk and the disk might shatter [had that happen. ruined the entire drive]. Since it's a new laptop you can call Toshiba [ha ha ] and send that in and get a new one which hopefully wont be so noisy.

Decided to send laptop back and get a new one but issued points for answering anyway.

Thanks for the help.

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