CD/DVD And Video Problems On Laptop

I am having with my wife�s Samsung R610 laptop, running Windows 7. The first indication of a problem was when my wife commented that videos (whether attached to emails or accessed from websites) were slow to open.

After a weekend trying a number of strategies to solve this (installing codec updates, VLC, Media Player Classic, etc) I have come to the conclusion there are a number of problems which may or may not be related. I shall describe the symptoms and hope that someone can see a common denominator and hopefully point me in the right direction.As mentioned, video files (regardless of what format they are) are very difficult to view.

However, they will sometimes play with good sound and vision and synchronisation, so proving that the media player software and the video hardware are not fatally flawed. The Laptop has a combined DVD/CD player/burner but no matter what disc is put in, AutoPlay does not give any indication the disc is recognised. (My) Computer shows the disc (whether it is a DVD, CD, data or movie) yet as soon as I try to open/explore or read the disc in any way, (My) Computer stops responding. Any attempt to close (My) Computer via Ctrl+Alt+Del fails and it takes forever to close the application.

At one stage, having put an audio CD in the drive, I left the computer to have lunch and after about 15 minutes the audio was heard, the disk playing as normal. However the moment I paused Play and tried to restart it Media Player would no longer work for me. Device Manager shows no conflicts, and the CD/DVD player is reportedly using the up to date driver and working properly. Attempts to burn data files to a blank CD also fail and Computer locks up!

My wife did remind me however that ever since the laptop was new (with Vista installed) there has always been a problem using the DVD/CD burner - I had forgotten! At one stage I was on the point of going out to buy a new DVD/CD unit but since the one in the laptop does on occasion work as intended