I like to play CDs on my computer but every time I do it it’s like WHIRRRRR and EEEEEEEEEE and PSSSHHHHHHH and I’m like no man, I don’t need your 10 million rotations per second, I just want to play a CD. Can I make it go slower or something? It’d probably be easier on my CD drive and it’s annoying having to listen to music over the WHIIRRRRRRRRR.
I’m not aware of a way to throttle the motor speed of a drive. Is this a CD writer, or a CD-ROM drive? Some ROM drives are pretty noisy, while among writers, some Plextors spin so fast, you can hear them in the next room. Some drives go so fast, they pass the structural integrity point of the discs, and they shatter inside the tray!
You may not get any relief here, but at least I’m curious to know what you’re using, and its rated read speed. 40x? 52x? Higher?
It doesn’t SAAAAAY. Can I look it up through my computer? Because it’s not printed on the front of the drive. I would say faster than 52x for CDs though. I have two DVD drives, one read-only and the other is a burner. Oh, and my computer thinks I have a THIRD DVD drive. Liekwut :S Should I have like… kept the 16x drive from my ancient computer? 
It should tell you what kind of drives you have if you right click on My Computer, and go to the Hardware Manager, and look under CD/DVD drives. The manufacturer and model number should show up on the list. Failing that, you can d/l a free program used for extracting CDs, called Exact Audio Copy, and it shows the same info in the top left corner. I don’t know what to tell you about your third phantom drive that the computer thinks you have… And no, I don’t think you should have kept your old drive. New drives read CD-Rs much better than old drives did.
Oops, I meant to type, “right click on My Computer, select Properties” and then go to Device Manager. I’m sorry, it’s late. I’m going to bed now! No more typing for me!
The CD drive I put into my Win98 machine theoretically had a sequence of button pushes to slow down the transfer rate - which would have been good, if it worked, because even the slowest one I could get was too fast for playing music. (Data worked fine.) If you men the motor, you’re out of luck, I think.
Here is a piece of software that purports to be able to throttle the spin speed of optical drives.