DVD reading difficulties

Hey,

Last summer I purchased a new ThinkPad T42 from Lenovo Canada, 2378RAU, which comes with the CD-RW/DVD combo drive (play, write, rewrite CDs, play DVDs, no more, no less).
When I first got it (on the day that I got it), I had trouble with the ultrabay (combo drive) door locking and not opening when I tried to open it. I went to the Lenovo website and found an updated DLA (Drive Letter Access) driver for my computer which was to solve the problem, downloaded it, and it did.
However, when playing DVDs, it will occasionally, part-way through the movie/episode, start to do split second pauses as if it is skipping. Judging by the sound that the drive is making, it sounds like the reader is jumping back and forth between two points of data very quickly, and getting bogged down by the process and finding itself not able to keep up with reading the DVD to put the video and audio up on the screen continuously.
Here's what I have tried to remedy the problem: I went back to the IBM website (later) and found a further updated DLA driver, and downloaded it; I changed my CD drive speed from silent to normal to high performance under the power management settings for windows (which can also be accessed via the BIOS), I fiddled with the "Hardware Decode Acceleration" and "Hardware Colour Acceleration" options in my DVD-playing software, WinDVD 5, and I also tried some of the above options with the DLA enabled on the drive, as well as the DLA disabled on the drive.
Even with trying all of these things, I still cannot get the drive to work correctly and I have no other options...

Any insights?

Thanks,
cibulet

 

anybody?...

 

Well it sounds like the drive could be misreading information. Try and clean the lense with a DVD cleaner. Other than that, as far as I can see the drive might be going.

Does it only happen in one program, or have you tried others?

 

Perhaps a firmware upgrade will help although I think you'll need a floppy drive. If you are not using DLA I'd get rid of it. It is flakey software and a known troublemaker.

 

I'm with zazon. Try flashing the drive with latest firmware and get rid of the DLA

 

I had this problem and was able to fix it by going to the display setup options. Check to see if the display is automatically set to either have a screen saver come on or to turn off the display or reduce power after a set period of time. I think that the computer was not "reading" that a DVD playing meant that the computer was actually in operation.