So, I'm minding my own business and trying to copy a compressed 3.6 GB VPC from a DVD on my main machine. It's taking forever. Worse, I can hear the stupid drive spin up every 4 seconds, seek, and read a tiny bit of data. Thinking that 1) I'm wayyyy too in touch with the sounds on my machine, and 2) this is really going to take forever if I'm right, I fire up perfmon. Sure enough, every 4-5 seconds I get a burst of 4-6 MB copied - otherwise NOTHING.

Screw that. Slap the disk out, cancel the copy operation, and slip the disk into my external, USB 2.0, optical device. Sustained transfers of 6-12MB. Within a few minutes the entire copy operation is done.

Then it hits me, maybe the lense on the internal drive is dirty?

After 5 minutes of rummaging through disks and other crap, I find my laser-lense cleaner. Within a few minutes I'm transfixed on the calming and soothing voice of the laser-lense-cleaner-guy telling me how every SPECK of dust will soon meet its maker.  (Actually, I skipped as far ahead in the track as I could... life's too short to listen to that crap.)

After cleaning (3x, just to be sure), I tried copying the same file. Woahhh... sustained xfer of 8-18MB. I'm going to have to clean my optical devices more often....