HP wont read some disks? Any ideas?

Hello everyone

I bought an HP DV9705 over the weekend, for what I need it for i think it's fine and over all very impressed with it.

There's one issue with it regarding a particular CD. It's a game disk (PC DVD - and game is Vista compatable) and when inserted the drive just makes a clicking noise. I assumed the disk had a problem with it but I put it in to my desktop pc and it worked fine. I haven't experienced it with any other disks although I don't have that many games to test it out with.

Just wondering if anyone has any idea what might be going on and if i need to take it back to the shop?


- Another quick question, from what I understand, the integrated graphics card will used system RAM. Can this not be overcome by increasing the RAM from 2 to say 4 GB? Or am I misunderstanding what using system RAM means?

Thanks

 

Someone at work seems to think it might be the copy protection on that disk.

 

What game are you talking about and is this an original DVD (not a copy)? You can try shutting off autoplay on the drive then navigate to the drive via explorer and try playing/installing from there. 2gb ram should be plenty for most games but again we would need to know what game to say if 3gb ram would make much of a difference. (btw unless you have a 64bit OS you are maxed at 3gb ram, only 64b systems can use the full 4gb of ram).

Other than that, any defects in the disk? (cracks, scratches, or dirty?)

-Reby

 

This doesn't answer the problem at hand, but it is a side fix for it. So try the following:

-Put the CD in your desktop and copy all the files to your HDD.
-Share the folder you copied all the files to.
-Go on your laptop and connect to that share via a network and copy all the files to the laptop.
-You should now be able to install the game.
-In order to run the game though you will probably need a CD-crack. This is a patch that allows you to play the game without having the CD inserted. You obviously still need the original CD-key for the game, but it's a hassle to have to insert the CD every time you want to play a game anyways.

 

Most likely a faulty drive, on my first laptop (compaq) they gave me a faulty drive, it would only read certain cd's and dvd's. Sent it in for repairs and fixed!

The more RAM you have the more memeory your gfx card can utilize so yes upgrading it will speed things up

 

Thanks for all that.

I haven't got the game with me but it's called something like Stronghold. I found a forum for the game and a couple of other people have had the same problem, most of them with notebooks. I think it might have something to do with the way the game has been re-released with 1 disk instead of 2. I'll check it out tomorrow but I'm pretty sure there are some sort of disk images that my DVD drive doesn't like.

I've got 2BG of RAM turning up tomorrow. I will only end up with 3GB anyway because the 2 slots have 1GB each. At least it will give me as much boost as possible seeing how I don't think anything else on the notebook can be upgraded.

 

Its most likely your drive, alot of notebook drive seems to come faulty or retarded. One of my DV2000's cant burn into DVD-R's but works fine for +R's and my newer one is the opposite.

You will definately notice the speed of an extra gig of RAM