Dvd/cd rom

i have a sony vaio laptop cds work fine but it wont play dvds

 

How old is the laptop? Are you sure it has a DVD-ROM drive? If it's an older machine it may have a CD-ROM drive which won't play DVD's.

 

its a dvd-rw

 

What exactly happens when you attempt to play a DVD? Are the DVD's that won't play commercial movie disks or are you trying to install a DVD game?

If the problem is with DVD movies, which media software player are you trying to use? Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling that? Or maybe installing a different one. I think there are probably at least a couple of free or shareware ones here in MG's download section as well as the big name commercial ones that are often bundled with DVD-ROM players/burners.

In addition, tell us a bit more about your laptop hardware. Which model (and how old is it?) Vaio do you have? Buy it used or new? Which OS is installed on it? Have you noticed any other sorts of problems with your laptop, even stuff that may seem unrelated to this problem? Made any recent hardware changes to it? Installed any new software shortly before the problem started?