CD drive failure?

Hey everybody,I seem to be having a problem with my laptop. I've got a Dell XPS Gen 2 laptop. It's a good 3.5 years old now and I really havent had any problems with it so far except that the CD drive has suddenly decided to stop reading cd's. The actual name for it is ''Sony DVD+-RW DW-D56A''. The odd thing about it is that is reads DVD-ROMS without any problem. I will get an old game on a CD and put it in and the drive seems to have a hard time starting up. I can hear clicking and the CD spinning but then it skips or something and starts over. I've tried pretty much every game I have and each one on a CD-rom doesnt work. When I put in a DVD-rom game like Oblivion or something like the Microsoft office vista dvd-rom I have it boots up and reads without any problems whatsoever. I've been able to install and uninstall both without any hickups or anything by the drive.Now I was under the impression that the lasers to read CD's and DVD's were the same so is there any way to explain this? Does anyone know if there is a way to fix this either? I have tried cleaning out the drive and all that but no luck. I called Dell and they don't manufacture that type of cd drive anymore so I would have to buy some garbage replacement they have that isnt even a dvd drive and is rediculously expensive. I've thought about bringing it into a computer repair shop of some kind but I've never really trusted those places.Any help would really be appreciated.CD drive failure?
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