CD roms on battery power?

I have a question about power management and battery settings - do they affect the settings of the CD-drive? I have some teaching games that I use, nothing heavy duty, that are on CD. On my old desktop they ran fine, no delays, but now with the laptop, the CD drive doesn't seem to stay on all the time. So every time the programme needs to use a sound clip, for example, there is a bit of a delay while it spins up and find the clip and then plays it. The programme doesn't need continual activity, so I suspect the drive is going off in that 30 seconds when there's nothing happening, and then having to turn on again when it next needs something from the CD. Can I somehow set it to keep the CD always 'on'? I'm using the Power4Gear programme on battery power, but I have it at the highest of the battery settings when I'm using the CD, and in the configuration there are only options to set the hard disk and the screen and stuff, not the CD drive. I haven't been able to find other settings for the CD drive anywhere either. It's an M5N.