"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Scott" wrote in message
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Arfa Daily wrote:
"Scott" wrote in message
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Arfa Daily wrote:

To be honest, you are likely to be wasting your time getting to the
lens to clean it, as this is highly unlikely to be your problem unless
a) you live in a very smoky house, or b) you've recently had some
dusty building work done. Unlike with a CD player, normal household
dust tends not to deposit on the lens of a DVD deck, because of the
extremely high rotational speed of the disc, compared to a CD deck.
This causes a layer of air to be dragged round under the disc at high
speed, which tends to keep the lens dust-free. From years of
experience repairing DVD players, it is far more likely that you have
a worn laser ( or possibly, but less likely ) a worn spindle motor. If
the unit plays CDs without skipping, then you can be reasonably sure
that it is a laser issue.

Arfa
It started skipping when I was playing a CD. It has been exposed to a
lot of smoke from people exhaling towards the TV. I'm prepare for the
worst anyways, just in case the DVD unit is bad I already have the
replacement # from Panasonic($110). So either way I have to pull the
unit out.

-ss

You may be lucky then, and a clean of the lens might restore it - for a
while at least, and assuming that it's not a computer-style IDE type
drive. Cleaning never seems to help with these. Clean the lens with a
cotton bud (Q-Tip) moistened with electronics grade (99.7% + ) isopropyl
alcohol. Polish with a dry cotton bud. Don't be tempted to adjust any
pots mounted on the laser. Mis-adjustment of them is likely to result in
rapid destruction of the laser diode(s).

If the price you have from Pan is for just a laser, rather than a
pre-assembled sub deck, be aware that most Pan DVD players, require
mechanical adjustment of the tilt and skew after the laser is fitted.
Provided that the model in question has the jitter meter software built
in, this is not difficult, if a little fiddly.

Arfa
Thanks for all the info! It has a IDE connector on the back so I'm
assuming it's IDE. Also the price from Panasonic is for the whole unit.

Yeah, I kinda suspected that might be the case, which is why I made the
comment. In that case, I think, from experience, that you are unlikely to
recover it with cleaning. As these drives are pretty much totally
enclosed, anything like cigarette smoke has a tendency to condense out on
the outside of the drive, rather than on internal components. I think that
in the end, you will finish up replacing the whole drive, as you felt that
you might have to.

Arfa



Well if it is IDE could he just purchase a cheap computer DVD drive and put
it in there? I'd try that, but I have no expierence with dvd players that
use IDE drives and don't know if it would work.

Mike