BleepingComputer.com: All Media Via Disc Has Constant Graphical And Audio Glitches

Whenever I put in a dvd or cd, I get graphical and audio glitches. If the media has a visual, it will seem as if the video is lagging, and speech will be like this: "h-e-e-e-l-l-lo m-m-y na-m-m-e-e-e i-i-i-s-s s-s-o-ola-r-r-i-i-s-s.". It barely affects the playback speed, it's just the frames jump and so does the sound. This effect is mainly seen through video. If I listen to music directly off the cd, I get very slight, yet still annoying, audio glitches too. This does not affect music or videos already saved on my laptop, so I'm pretty sure it's my dvd drive. This had to have happened fairly recently because a few days ago I copied some music cd's to my laptop and I did not have these problems.

I have no idea whatsoever how to diagnose this problem. I have run virus scans, defragged, manually cleaned the laser eye thing (with no effect), and used one of those dvd cleaner discs. My drivers are also all up to date according to the "device manager". Please help!

Here are some general checks, just in case:

If you have not already, check the optical drive jumpers, make sure the optical drives are on the secondary ide channel, and not hooked up to the same channel as the hdd. ensure that you have the drives set to master slave or cable select and cable select. I have seen problems like your when the drives are set as cable select and master or slave. Go into the bios and re detect the optical drives. Unfortunately, I cant remember which mode you need as I am running SCSI, If I remember correctly you should be using UDMA> or PIO Mode 4.

About the only thing I understood was "go into the bios" :\. Sorry.

Am going to try a system restore from a few days ago. If that works, I will backtrack my progress and see if I can find what has caused this. All I have done today is install a few games. I doubt that affected whatever it was you were talking about that might be wrong.

Yes! System restore worked! Which means it was one of the games I installed and/or the patches I downloaded off the internet for those games. I cannot check which one at this time, but hopefully in the next 24 hours I will be able to.

No Problem. If what you are trying does not work, PM me and I will follow up in this thread.
You could also try uninstalling the games and then re installing to see if one of them is causing the problem.

I will attempt to track down from which game/patch this problem came in the next 24 hours, and I will post the results here. Thanks for taking the time to post and help me .

Hmm, I have reinstalled both those games and the subsequent patches, testing the audio and video with a dvd after each install, and I have found no abnormalities. Upon recollection, I think the problem I was facing had something to do with the way I downloaded one of those patches. It made me download a client type thing, then it downloaded the patch. The patch worked though, but I think it might have messed with my computer somehow. In any case, I don't currently have the problem. Should it develop, I will post again here.