Question about cd drive (w/ Inspiron E1505)

I'm not sure if this is the place to ask this, but I need some help with what I think is a problem with my cd drive and I don't know where exactly to ask.

So first, I have an Inspiron E1505 with a Sony DVD+-RW DW-Q58A cd/dvd drive. I THINK I have a firmware/driver issue with it because of a weird problem I've been having lately.

I noticed a couple times when running the DVD-ROM of a new game, the disc spun up really, REALLY loudly. And, the disc won't autoplay (I don't know if that's related to the cd drive or not...autoplay hasn't been working for a while, now). For the most part though, the disc spins-up normally and the game runs just fine. The problem comes up everytime I quit the game -- the screen goes black as if going back to the desktop but seems to freeze. Then, I get a "...this application will now terminate" message. The ACTUAL problem, though, is that when I eject the disc after the game is totally closed out, I get the blue screen of death. It wasn't doing that at first until recently. Even after I let the computer sit for a while after the game closed, I get the blue screen of death if I eject the disc. The message the bsod gives me is "page fault in nonpaged area" ... is the computer still trying to read from the disc or something??? I don't have the rest of what the bsod said right now, but I'll add it later when I come across it again...

If anyone can give me some advise or point me in the right direction it'd be greatly appreciated!!!

 

Which OS are you using? Do you happen to have any of the error codes produced during the BSOD?

 

It doesn’t sound to me like a problem with your CD drive, more like a Windows/software related issue. Did you try searching the internet to see if others who play the same game have reported similar issues? When you exit the game go to task manager and look if additional processes related to the game are still running in the background. If if you only get a blue screen when ejecting the CD after running that specific game then it has to be a software related issue.

Are you running a cracked version of the game, or running it with some sort of a drive emulator to break CD copy protection, cheats, trainers or some other type of a modifier ?

 

Sorry, I forgot to post my specs. ^^;
XP SP3 (Home Edition)
Intel Centrino Duo 1.83GHz (T2400)
1022MB RAM
Page file: 479MB used, 1976MB available
ATI Mobility Radeon x1300
*As far as I can tell -- if Can you run it? is reliable -- my video card slightly passes the minimum requirement for the game, which is The Sims 2 Apartment Life. Everything else is more than enough. The game runs smoothly, like past expansions did, with the graphics options on high.

After having the issue I updated all of my drivers, which didn't affect the problem in a good or bad way.

At the moment, I don't have the bsod codes, but I'll post them when I get it again. Would a log produced by the game be helpful? I have plenty of those ><

Unfortunately, I can really only assume it's this specific game. The past expansions of it worked fine without anything like this happening. I have no other game to go by since I don't play any other games. Is there any way I could test this? I don't really know what a cracked version of a game is, but I bought it from the store. I'm not running a drive emulator. I AM running the game with mods, BUT I'm pretty sure if they were causing conflicts, it would happen during gameplay. (I also only added my stuff in after running it without and patching it...my stuff doesn't affect the problem at all, everything shows up in the game).

Lastly, I have looked all over the internet for people with similar problems. No one seems to have this particular problem, with the game crashing only when quitting.

EDIT: Here's the first part of the most recent log generated by the game. I don't know if this is helpful or not, but it seems to have a similar code the bsod gave me -- I'll put that up soon.

Exception time: 01/09/2009, at 23:59:48.
Exception code: 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) ACCESS_VIOLATION.
Current thread ID: 3364 (0x00000d24).
Version information:
Application/module path: C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\The Sims 2 Apartment Life\TSBin\Sims2EP8.exe
Application/module version name: The Sims 2 EP8
Application/module version: 1.16.0.194
System version: Windows NT 5.1
System memory: 1024 Megabytes total, 216 Megabytes free.
Application/module configuration: ReleaseSRT

 

when I searched for 0xC0000005 (-1073741819) sims in google, plenty of hits turned up. There were few suggestions and workarounds, like this for example. Read some of the other google hits , maybe you'll find a fix.

 

Thanks PhoenixFx. I have one last thing to post -- I wrote down the code for the most recent stop error.
"0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0x806E694F, 0xF7AB0C30, 0XF7AB092C"

There was no message above this time, and actually this time the game didn't crash. I think it must be some of my stuff, but if you know what that code means could you tell me?