How I fixed my laptop's half broken CD drive

[FuturePilot]

This CD drive on my laptop has been somewhat broken for a while now. It makes things throw random errors at me. For example, if I'm trying to install something in Windows from a CD it gets about half way done and then tells me the CD is corrupted, which I now for sure it isn't because it works on other computers. Whenever I try to boot a live CD or install a distro it's painfully slow. It took about an hour and a half to install Feisty. And just yesterday I was trying to install Debian and it kept throwing random errors at me about corrupted packages. It seemed to be different ones each time so it was definitely the drive's fault.

So I decided I had had enough with this darn thing. So I restarted the computer, ejected the CD drive, then slammed it back in as hard as I could (without breaking it of course) and then it worked perfectly. No errors and it's super fast now. It hasn't worked this good since it was new.

[use a name]

I've had something similar a few weeks ago. A working dvd-drive stopped working, after the laptop had gone through various hands... After it had been dragged around for a while again, the drive seemed to stick out a bit. I was sure I pushed it in as far as possible before. Now I could push it back a bit further again, which caused the drive to make good contact again. Seems like the socket it should be pushed into had moved around a bit, breaking contact with the drive and had then come back a bit again. It's weird anyway. You would say that these things should be screwed in a bit tighter.