Most large electronics stores carry a CD/DVD drive cleaning kit. It consists of a CD disc with one or two brushes glued on. When the disc is inserted into the drive, Windows activates the drive, causing the brushes to sweep around and dust off the CD/DVD heads. That may cure the problem.

If the problem is actually failing electronics within the drive; there is no repair; you'd need to replace the drive.

Good luck.

Kurt

    Hello all:

    Thanks for so many experiences in your responding. I have been convinced that I'd better buy a new one.

    New problem is coming, whick should I purchase?  My old one is Toshiba: Pentium 2.4G; Hard disk 40G; Ram memory 1G. It has one disadvantage, the sound value is a bit too low, usually I need to use headphone for listening.

   Could you remind me your experience and knowledge?  --Zhao

As John says -- the choice is baffling.

Are you in the USA? But anywhere I would not buy a laptop computer without seeing it open and working and checking whether you like the keyboard, screen, the "mouse" (I can't stand touchpads!) and so on.

On the screen some come with highly glossy ones with attractive names like brightview or similar and you have to take into consideration where and how you use it. If you use it outdoors or indoors with a window or something bright behind you, you may find reflections distracting even if the picture looks brighter. Others come with a more matt screen which is not so subject to this problem.

With LCD screens they tend, in general, only to look their best and sharpest at what is called their natural resolution so if you find lettering too small to read and you can't adjust the size of text within Windows (which does have such a feature) or within the application itself then you may have to balance this off against screen size.

Is weight important for travelling -- under 4lbs makes a difference in how you feel about it if you do much traveling -- and you may have to balance screen size and other features against weight. For example, the much publicized at present Netbooks weighing less than 3lbs usually don't have an optical (DVD/CD) drive in them or if they do are much more expensive. And again if weight is important to you, does the published/advertised weight include the power brick or not.

If you fly long distances then battery size (3 cell, 6 cell) and other factors have to be balanced against weight and size.

Then how to you connect to the internet -- dial up, cable, cell phone -- and what you need to plug into it when at home like the printer. Most external devices come these days with USB connections and lapptops come with those but if by any chance you have an older printer that connects by parallel port few laptops have that now.

If you have older external devices like a printer then be wary of buying a laptop with what is called 64 bit Windows in it (VISTA or Windows 7) without getting expert advice as to whether there are drivers to control the external device available either as part of WIndows or from the device maker.

WIndows 64bit can handle more memory than Windows 32 bit but for most purposes and especially on laptops that is quite enough memory.

Those are a bunch of generalities affecting choice, together of course with the reputation of the manufacturer and how any service needed is handled.

I've always had a good experience with Lenovo (used to be IBM) and recently with HP/Compaq although I see a current report in PCWorld on user experience puts HP/Compaq very low, which surprises me.

Toshiba seems to be doing well at present although it went through a period when we had plenty of reports here on problems but a lot were the effects of "upgrading" Windows to a new version without first checking if the drivers and special utilities that a laptop needs compared with a desktop.

Hope that helps rather than confuses you! If you care to post how you use your laptop most -- internet browsing, email etc or processing photo images or videos for example I'm sure you will get some help.

Here in the USA www.salescircular.com is a useful guide to current special offers from the office supply stores etc.

  Hugh

>> For all manufacturers, make sure you look at both their consumer lines and their business lines. Some of the features of the latter are not offered in the former, and the cost is not that different. 

Not to be in the least contentious, Kurt, but your statement suggests a query as to whether there is/are feature(s) that are particular to the consumer line, but are not considered necessary or desirable in the business line?

Best regards,  4merCL

Consumer lines may include more multimedia features or fancier graphic controllers and larger screens. Business lines may have higher resolution displays or better system management and security options. A system built to order in the same configuration will cost the same from either line, but the options in the two lines may differ. I could not, for example, get a 1920x1600 display in the consumer lines but the minimum warranty in the business line is three years.

I'm not suggesting that either line is "better", just that the configuration options are different and both should be looked at to get exactly what the buyer wants.

Kurt

> the comparison is not just in the one direction.

Absolutely. The kind of system suitable for a sales rep, for example, might be considerably different than that for a high schooler.

> identically configured machines would be priced alike, regardless of whether they originated with a business or a consumer base machine.

Well, I did not phrase that well. I should have made it clearer that you might not be able to get a particular feature in one line or the other, so an exact comparison might not be possible. But if you're upgrading a hard drive from 160GB to 250GB on each system, for example, the cost would be the same. They don't tack on a surcharge because the system you're buying is classified as business rather than consumer.

> My intuition would have been that business buyers might be less price sensitive than consumer buyers.

That might be true for mega-corporations, but SMB folks can be just as careful about money as consumers. Perhaps more so in some cases. Just because they can take a tax deduction for the depreciation doesn't mean they don't understand that they're going to have to write a check up front.

Kurt

    Hello Hohn, Huge and all friends:

     I am happy for getting so many  respondences and some are in detail. I am living in Chicago. My personal laptop in merely for home using. The way connecting to Internet is high speed through telephone line by AT&T as the ISP.

    Befor buying a new Laptop, in addition to what you have reminded me to pay attention, I am also  worrying about software  compatibility, especially the "GHOST" and "PQMagic".

   I have been using the "GHOST8" to backup my OS/C-Partition. Can the new Laptop,  with harddisk  larger than 150G,  be smoothly boot ed into traditional DOS and start the "GHOST8" and then clone the OS?  Besides, for such a huge harddisk, does the "PQMagic" still accormmodate to divide the harddisk into two or three partitions?

    Compatibility is a headache question, especially right now Window7 is a new OS. I am worrying about them seriously. Could you tell me?  --Zhao

    Hi Hugh:

    Thanks for your prompt reply. The information of "GHOST 15" you provided with is precious!

     What is the relationship between "GHOST 15" and "Acronis True Image 2010"?  There is a trial version of  "Acronis True Image 2010". I downloaded and installed, BUT I did not see what you told me "Disk Management" !! 

    I'd like to separate the OS in a independent partition C, it makes sense of security of own data and neatness. Most likely the PQMagic can not work anymore in Window7, I hope there is still another software can do the partition. 

    It seems that "GHOST 15" is expensive (~$60 -80). Perhaps the cause is that it is just released.       --Zhao

When I said << They also have Disk Management Suite which does what PQ Partitoin Magic used to do. >>

Disk Director Suite is the name Acronis give to their utility that effectively does the sort of thing that Partition Magic did but for more modern OS's as well.

But in Windows 7 Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management > Disk Management is the Windows utility that displays your drives graphically and through which you can do all sorts of things but in earlier versions the one thing you could not do was to shrink an existing partition so as to create another one on the same physical drive. This is what I meant when I said "your are fortunate"

You could divide a clean physical drive up into smaller logical partitions and format them, label them and so on but now within Windows 7 you can take a partition with files on it and free space and shrink it down leaving unallocated space in which you can then create a partition, format it give it labels and even change drive letters if you want to.

So if you have say a 320GB hard drive with sasy 100GB occupied with your XP installation -- OS and applications etc -- with Windows 7 you can shrink the 220GB of free space down to says 100 GB free space so that XP has 200GB half occupied and then in the 120GB which would show as allocated space you can say Create a partition and then Format it and install your WIndows 7 into it so that it is dual booted with XP and when you start or restart you computer you can choose which you want to use.

In case you are wondering about the chicken and the egg <s> you can do that shrinking during the installation of Windows 7 from the installation media -- the DVD or from a thumbdrive according to how you have your installation copy of Windows 7.

Hope that helps.

Go for GHOST or Acronis according to price although Acronis may be the better solution and I've not used GHOST.

Partition Magic definitely should not be used on any OS beyond XP or you may do damage -- it's too risky in my opinion.

Separating the OS from the applications and data is going out of favor I believe because some applications really insist on being installed on drive C: -- some insist on going under Program FIles and some prefer not to go under Program FIles so it is really better not to force them to do just what you want but to let them do it their way.

You can make a case for putting data files into a separate partition so the the total number of irreplaceable files is fewer and backing up is quicker but otherwise just let things fall where they will -- this is even more the case with the later versions of Windows including Windows 7 where there are locations that show up in your file manager but that don't actually contain the files that show as being there; they show as being there because it may seem more logical for all files of a certain kind to be grouped together -- perhaps like a library card catalog did not contain the books but told you where to find them so this tells Windows where to find them.

That's probably not a good "image" but with Windows and computers things are rarely what they seem to be!

  Hugh