DVD playback problem

[dEad]

hi,
a few months ago i acquired a new Toshiba Satellite laptop having broken the last one. I have only now tried to use the DVD drive installed to playback a DVD. The drive has accepted all types of CD until now, but refuses to accept DVD's.

When i insert a CD the autoplay menu comes up on XP and i select 'play using Intervideo WinDVD 4'. The program loads but then will not start the disc, instead it just freezes.

I mentioned this to a laptop using friend of mine and she said that there was a similar problem when she first tried to use the DVD drive on her system and that i needed to download some sort of patch to fix it.

Please could someone tell me how to fix this problem. Is it a hardware or software thing?

much appreciated

[glc]

Will it play with any of the other choices, such as Windows Media Player?

[dEad]

No, Media player tells me that it is currently unable to playback DVD's because there are too many colours being used. Changing this appears to have no effect.
While scrolling through Windows explorer i noticed that the disk has been recognised (ie, it tells me that Akira is in drive e).

[oddjob]

Try to get your hands on a copy of PowerDVD from CyberLink. I had the same problem with my desktop computer and bought a new drive, but still couldn't play movies. Installed PowerDVD, and both drives work fine.

Check these threads addressing the same issue in desktop computers:
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...threadid=92180
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...threadid=92278