Combo drive spins fast for Audio CD

[Ogg]

When playing a regular audio CD, the Combo drive seems to run at more than 1x speed, and consequently the whole experience is not so great because of the high-speed noise. Is that normal for audio CD? I guess playing DVDs would be just as noisy? Is there a config adjustment I can make to tame the audio CD function? Further to the problem I just noticed that the hdd light is always flickering when playing audio CD. Is that normal?

--Ogg

[rkawakami]

The T23 BIOS has a setting for the CDROM speed under the Config/Power option menu. It allows for High speed, Normal and Quiet. If there's a similar one in the T4x, then try the "quiet" setting and see if that helps.

Don't know about the HD activity. Could be that the OS is reading the CD and buffering the data. Or it could be another application doing the disk accesses (e.g., antivirus).

[Ogg]

My T40p has the same High/Normal/Quiet setting. I spotted that after I made my initial post. Meanwhile, until you replied, I managed to get rid of the noise another way. I disabled "Digital audio" in the hardware config for the drive, rebooted. When I started the audio CD again, it played at normal speed.

UPDATE:I spoke too soon! I can't seem to duplicate the solution. Turning off Digital audio doesn't help afterall.

[billyrom]

If you are accidentally using Nero burning software for burning your discs, you should try Nero DriveSpeed utility from this bundle. Pros are, you can change reading speed of you drive anytime w/o restarting of your notebook. Of course, if you are using MS operating system.

billyrom

[Ogg]

Thanks for the Nero tip. I remember a speed setting in that app when I was playing with other people's Thinkpads (T21, T23, T30)Don't have Nero on my own TP though. However.. what I *did* do was replace the CDRW/DVD unit with a new one. All works MUCH better now!