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annabelle:
:? I will give it a try but I think it is knackered although it is only about 3 years old.

landyman37:
Right found that if you play a cd it slow`s the pc down.

Evilgoat:

--- Quote from: "landyman37" ---Right found that if you play a cd it slow`s the pc down.
--- End quote ---


I would suspect the drive is toast, that sounds like excessive read errors. the laser is going or the sled is jamming. Check what software is running and check the disk in another machine. Does it take ages to read the disk too?

Range Rover Blues:
It's because the cacky yank software you are probably using insists on playing the CD through the operating system rather than using the D to A converter within the ROM drive and inputting the analogue signal directly into the audio card.

With Windows 98 SE you could choose for yourself, now you can't.

Evilgoat:

--- Quote from: "Range Rover Blues" ---It's because the cacky yank software you are probably using insists on playing the CD through the operating system rather than using the D to A converter within the ROM drive and inputting the analogue signal directly into the audio card.

With Windows 98 SE you could choose for yourself, now you can't.
--- End quote ---


Very few machines have the analog output connected anymore and to be honest it makes no odds. DMA is used to pass the data comming in on the IDE channel via a small buffer to the output audio device, this means that the computer has almost no input to the process. The audio leaves the drive as PCM encoded 16 bit audio and arrives at the soundcard in the same format so no conversion is needed and so its spooled right back out of memory and played. We are talking about a few K of memory too. All the player does is send start/styop/pause/etc as it would using analog. This process is managed by the DMAC on the motherboard, all the CPU has to actually do is say 'OK, off you go then' :)

You can still disable digital audio in XP, dont remeber how of fthe top of my head but its pretty simple, IIRC its in the advanced settings for the drive.

Choppy playback is normally the last sign of impending drive death, as I said I would expect cheaper CDRs and CDRWS to be an issue in this machine right now and they may not even read at all. I'll bet it spends an inordinately long time reading the disks too.

As the drive ages the cheap semiconductor lasers in the drives age. Expensive players dont suffer from this as much but even then operate a feedback loop to boost the output power over time. As the beal weakens and diverges the accuracy drops and the drive spends more and more time re-reading patches of disk. Writeable and rewritable media requires higher laser output and this is why they are the frst disks to suffer. As an aside, the PS2 suffers horribly from dead lasers.

The other common fault is the drive motor and sled. Again these are made as cheap as possible and the motors do get warm during use. This means the little plastic bearings melt and end up making the sled jam and skip. If a block is misse,d of course we then have to reseek, refocus and reread that block. If a whole track is missed then this takes longer. The sled will eventually lock and the motor will melt rendering the drive dead.

The sled that moves the laser along the disk surface is normally lubrigated with lithium grease. Over tim this collects gunk and in some cases will harden, also jamming the sled. This is a very common fault on LG drives (I spent a week fixing just that on about 150+ drives)

At the end of the day its a precision peice of kit and its been made as cheap as possible, thus has a useful life of about 3 years. Worse in smokey or dusty environments.

Changing them is easy. There will be a large ribbon cable and a power connector, possibly a small audio connector, disconnect all three. There will also be 4 screws holding it in normally. The drive will then just slip out.

Bfore you bin it, get your new drive and look at the back of both old and new. On the old drive there will be six pins, two of which will have a little plastic cap. Normally they will be marked CS MA SL (Cable Select, Master, Slave). Note where it is and look for the same marking on the new drive and move the cap to the same position if it isnt already there. The cap will just pull off.
Screw it back in and reconnect the power and the audio connector if there was one. Looking at the ribbon cable it will have a red or blue stripe. This is pin one and the drive should have pin one marked.

Put it all back together and you should be good.

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