The Case of the Opening/Closing CD Tray

I was watching movies on my PC the other night when my CD tray suddenly started opening and closing by itself. It sorta frightened me during the first few times it did that, but since I didn't get any goose bumps and neither did my hair stand on end, I dismissed it as some hardware malfunction.

As I meant to, of course I asked for help/ideas from Master Job. I was, however, surprised that he made a joke out of it -- insisting that it must have been a ghost or something. Ugh! And I never thought I'd hear something like that from this no-nonsense guy. I expected real help.

So finally, I got to get him back to his "no-nonsense" self, and he helped me uninstall the CD ROM in question, but the problem stayed the same even after restarting my PC. Anyway, Master Job, unable to defend his supernaturally-inspired theories, finally attributed the problem to a virus.

Out of desperation, I tried to Google (when did Google become a verb??? Why don't we say we Yahoo something?:P) it and voila, it turned out to be a pretty common problem!

Its causes are either: 1) when the button (for lack of a better term) used to open/close the CD ROM is sunken or when the spring inside that button has become loose; or 2) a virus.

One of the sites/forums I came across suggested using Cwshredder.zip and Spybot-Search and Destroy. It also recommended using SE Adaware, but the first two were enough to solve my problem. Well, actually, Cwshredder didn't find anything wrong with my system, so it was Spybot-Search and Destroy (did a double take on this...sounded like a movie title at first :P) that did the trick. Apparently, the virus was more like a malware that infected browsers; thus, the opening/closing of the CD tray started when I opened a browser (didn't matter what).

Cwshredder and Spybot-Search and Destroy are both very user-friendly, so I won't include boring instructions on how to use them. Won't include the links for downloading them either, for tomorrow those links might be dead. You can simply Google -- or Yahoo!, or Bing? -- them. These three applications are absolutely for free.