Sony CD-RW CRX300E DVD/CD-Rom Drive

Hi guys, first of all let me say Im new in this forum and I dont understand much of the technical aspects of computers....so u may have to be patient with me. My problem is.......My cd/dvd drive was working perfectly...playing both cds and Dvds....I left it in england during the summer and when I came back from home it wouldnt play Dvds. It simply came up with a message 'Please insert disk into drive' When I inserted a dvd. I didnt understand this as it plays music cds fine. I tried a few things but none worked so I thought it was a hardware problem....but yerterday after reading this forum I downloaded Windows updates to see if that would make a diference....and it did! After downloading some updates it actually read the Dvd.....took a while and made strange noises but it read it. Although when I played the movie(using VLC) it skipped the whole way through. By skipping I mean that it plays and evey little time it freezes the image and sound and then continues.
I need help analysing my problem and finding a solution, is there anything I can do. Is it my hardware which is damaged or can this problem be fixed without having to buy a new drive?
Although it reads the dvd it takes ages, anyways thanks for listening and I hope someone will be able to help, cheers,
Jose.
Im running windows XP Home edition.

¡welome a la persona de los foros de España! :thumbs2:

(I hope the translator package did a good job with that !?! My spanish is terrible to say the least & I've a feeling the translator is no better than I am with noun/verb order in foreign languages ! :) & I just said 'welcome forums to the person spanish is !' :eek2: )

So enough with me thinking I can talk spanish ! .. I can't - I do tech stuff ! :D

'strange noises' is not good whatever might be happening software wise, can you describe it better ? (or different anyway) .. it might well be just spinning up & down between each read because of some software problem - but before we proceed further this wants deciding on one way or the other ..

Your problems to me, do sound software related & we can go through various steps to try & correct that later, but if we coincendally have some hardware issue at the same time, its going to be a waste of time.