So he did it again - I don't know how but Tom destroyed yet another CD-ROM drive. He currently is the one and only Windows user at my house, using a PC (Intel Celeron 2Ghz, MSI board, and what used to be an LiteON 56x CDROM) that I had built about two years ago.
Originally, I had put a Panasonic CD-Drive into the computer but that stopped working last year and so we replaced it with an even faster Drive (Lite-On 56 speed), we bought at our friendly PC-Club nearby.
I have to admit that this was one of the noisier drives I have seem over the years, one could hear it accelerate from literally every room in the house. However, this is a quite common phenomenon under LiteOn drives, caused by the mechanism they use to run the drive.
Anyway, no more LiteOn. Instead we bought a new Pacific Digital DVD-ROM 16X for under $40 at Frys. Surprisingly, there was a Toshiba drive in the box, which so far works really great, reads DVDs at up to 16x and CD up to 48x and is soooo peaceful and quiet.