Sony Vaio CR optical drive sucks?

I got my sony vaio cr123e\b last week and I was very happy with it.

Untill last night, my wife an I had to select pictures from our wedding that were in 4 DVDs.

This pictures have very high resolution so they are like 5MB each picture. The DVDs were completly loaded.

When I placed any DVD on the drive, It opened a window asking what to do with it so I choosed "open with windows explorer"

I started browsing inside the DVD and every time I selected some files to copy, windows explorer quited responding. I waited for about 10 minutes but I had to force it to stop the process and some times even open the drive to make windows explorer close. I could only copy one at a time and even so, most of the times windows explorer quited responding again.

Notes:

I have Windows Vista and only 2GB of RAM. My cpu is a t7300

The drive it's a Mat****a DVD RAM or something. I will check the model later

I was able to burn a CD-RW with 3 songs very easily.

The drive is very noisy. It's a kind of screeching noise.

This is a refurbished notebook.

If I could buy a new optical drive, which brand and model do you recommend?

Thanks

 

It might just be that the drive disagrees with the media used for your wedding photos. I'm assuming it's +/- R/RW media rather than a factory-produced DVD?

You could try copying the entire DVDs to fresh blanks using a different brand/type of media on a separate PC, then trying again. Whenever I've had the symptoms which you describe, it's because the drive is struggling to read from the (usually (re)writeable) media that I'm using... it happens most often with cheap media burned on a different PC or from an unknown source. (Most burners will read discs which they've written themselves without a hitch.)

If the drive makes strange noises irrespective of the discs you're using, you might want to investigate replacing it. It depends how brave/technical you are whether replacing the drive yourself is a viable proposition. Do you have a warranty on the notebook (even though it's refurbished)?

 

I have a warranty but I can't send it back becasue I bought it on the US but I'm in Brazil now, where I live.

It's very hard to ship electronic products to the US becuse the costums department charges very expensive taxes. I knew that buying this notebook was risky, but I took my chances since this same model is 3 times more expensive in Brazil.

I'm happy to know that this problem could be due to the media. They are sony RW DVD's but it could be the burning process, like you said. I hope so.
I will do more tests, specially with reliable DVDs and DVDs burned on my own notebook.

Thank you very much

 

One more thing... sometimes Explorer can choke if you use thumbnails view while also trying to open/preview files. This is because the file list window is trying to read all the files to create the thumbnails at the same time as reading the whole of one file to open it up. The drive flutters around trying to do both tasks at once and this can cause the strange noises.

Perhaps try again using list view (or whatever it's called in Vista), to rule out the thumbnail generation as the cause? If that solves it, try using a third party picture previewer like Google's Picasa tool and you might not get the same issue.

 

Yeah, i was going to say that you need to use the List mode or one without thumbnail view. My desktop which is much more powerful with a much quicker drive is even slow when loading SLR photos off of a disk - as compared to a memory card - and so when copying photos, you can either copy the entire folder w/out viewing contents or use the details or list mode.

See if that helps. But what you're experiencing is typical.

 

Yes the thumbnails view were on! It makes sense, I will try to set list view as the default view. Thanks again!