How to clean the laser

Hi I have been making backups of my DVD's for some time. I am now having problems when playing these which before hand I have had no problems. They play fine in other players and in my PC which makes me think my laser is dirty. I have tried using a disc cleaner but to no avail. I am wondering if there are other ways to clean the laser ie with a cotton bud or something. Any ideas and if so how I go about it. My standalone player is a Samsung N505. Cheers

no don't use a cotten swab that could damage the laser or knock it out of alignment makeing it b0rked best solustion take it in for a profestional cleaing if bothering you that much

Hy, I have the same problem. recently I had some problems with my home DVD player ("squares" appear in the image, image freezes or player jump, ...). My player is a 2 years old Panasonic; it always worked fine with burned DVD until now, so I tried to clean the lens but is was unsuccesfull. I used TDK DVD's, known to be the best quality. Have you problem systematically or it just happens sometimes randomly ? Theoretically, laser players require lens adjustement every 4-5 years! But the price of such operation can be expensive (even more than a new player). My goal is now to avoid burning DVD; I would like to build a multimedia center to stream music, photo and VOB files on my TV and HiFi. I haven't found the perfect solution yet but I'm still looking for.... Good luck

hm... I've used several times the cotton swab & very weak soap lotion way to clean the laser lens. to do so, I first let someone fix the lens of the laser (maybe with two swabs...) to prevent it from moving (dis-adjustment) while cleaning. then I cleaned the lens with the soap lotion. I afterwards used clean water to get rid of the residue soap. This way always got me working the CD/DVD drivers sucessfully. Only with clean water it didn't work, cause the dirt particles aren't solubilized by clean water (especially when the user is a smoker :( ) Demanding professional services for cleaning laser lenses would be more cost intensive than a new drive IMO.

I would prefer _not_ to use soap use iso instead the alchol will not damage any of the semi-conductor comonats if spilt :) remember use iso only because its 99.9% pure norm rubing alchol is ony 70% so thats what I use for cleaning :) works great just get a small battery fan to dry it with because blowing on it could get it dorty again :(