Hello Marshall,

Thursday, January 20, 2000, 4:22:11 AM, you wrote:

MA> I have a Creative 48x CD-Rom, that when I play games like Riven and
MA> Pandora's Box that require CD access, the drive is constantly spinning up
MA> and down.  I would imagine this is normal since it plays music and has
MA> constant video, but it is very loud and distracting.  Also, as it is
MA> accessing the disc, the sound will constantly freeze and can not keep up
MA> with the video.  And a lot of the times, the video gets really jerky.

I have the same Creative x48. These spinups-slowdowns mean that the
disk is bad (or the drive is dirty) and can hardly be read and it
should not occur on more than a few of your disks. The sound and video
problems are result of drive failing to provide the data since it
can't read it.

MA> Not to mention that the computer itself randomly freezes, no error messages,
MA> just freezes.  But that is for another post.

If there's a disk that is bad in the cd-rom, it may take up to
2 min. for the drive to abandon any attempts to read it, and all this
time the PC won't respond.

You can try cleaning the drive.

What I did (when the problem started to occur with almost any disk,
and also my PC froze occasionally) I took the drive to the repair
(on warranty) and they replaced it without any questions. My current
CD-ROM (still Creative x48, but different design) is much quieter and
takes bad disks better.

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