Thanks for the suggestions. It appears the CD drive is likely the problem. Strangely it doesn’t seem to have any drivers. Found the disc that came with it and even went to the website and there are no drivers, only utility softwares like Nero & ASUS E-Green. Firmware is up to date. But I did install the Nero disc speed checker and discovered the drive is only operating at about 8x speed, and it’s a 48x drive. Time to get a new drive it looks. I shouldn’t be surprised I guess, it is about a 5 year old drive (so is the rest of my pc, yikes!), it has served me well haha.