Help - DVD Drive Slowdown

[Team Greenbaum]

I have a Sony 8X DVD+/-RW drive model DW-U18A that I bought from NewEgg 6 months ago. It has worked great up until a week ago when it started running very slowly. It used to rip/read a whole DVD in about 15 minutes but now it takes over an hour. Same thing goes for burning a DVD: it takes about 4 times as long as it used to. Here’s what I've tried so far:

- Tried multiple programs to confirm it wasn't the software.
- Searched for new drivers on the Sony site. (There weren't any.)
- Removed the device via device manager and let Win XP re-install it.

Any other ideas?

aTdHvAaNnKcSe
-Scott

[fastvfr]

My Sony CD-RW/DVD-ROM has a speed of 52x/32x/52x/16x, but to access that I am forced to press and hold the single Disk Eject button for 10 seconds or so.

Until I do that the drive is effectively 40x/32x/40x/8x!

Imagine my surprise. And on top of that simply delightful function, I even got farked out of the $20 mail-in rebate....:(

Other than that, though, I have had no problems with this drive, reading or writing in any supported format.

Perhaps some digging online or in your drive's manual will tell you if your drive has a similar 'function'.

Good luck,

FastVFR

[podwich]

Could the lens be dirty? Just throwing out an idea.