Skipping bad disc, freezing, invalid dis...

Hello,
Just pulled out the manual on this machine and realized it is supposed to play CDs, as well (as you can guess, I haven't tried that in it).


Maybe I just expect too much from today's products ... I HAVE had this for 6 years, and for 5 of them it worked pretty good. I put up with having to get up off my lazy tail and punching the buttons on player because the remote decided not to work (even with new batteries and being wiped down to be sure the buttons weren't sticking). I even tolerated it "arguing" with me about a disc being in it, skipping areas, etc. now and then. But, now it is the rare event that it accepts a disc, and even rarer that it plays the disc without skipping bad sectors (which can include the WHOLE movie). I'm hard-headed, so I've even slow reversed back through whole movies, then hit play again -- hey, it works more often than you'd think, but it DOES take the fun out of watching a movie.

I've tried wiping the discs with cloth, the disc cleaner thing with the little brush, even got the tweezers after the errant cat/dog/human hair that got lodged on the eye, etc.

Figuring if it was already broke, I couldn't break it, I even took it apart to see if I could see anything obvious (still not sure what I was looking for), and cleaned it with an of compressed air (which it did need, considering the pesky spider webs).

The wierd thing is, on the $1 movies that you can pick up (shrink wrapped, brand new) of old shows, most of the time it will play them. But the movies I pay money to rent seem to give me the grief.

I can take the same disc and play it on the laptop just fine ... so, sadly, it's not the disc (I'm guessing).

I've just about given up on this machine, playing most of the movies on my laptop (which won't hook up to tv because I don't have some kind of S connection) ... try that in a living room where 3 or more people aren't sitting on the same couch! then, having to get up and hit the volume up or volume down! That's just lots of fun!

Anyway, any solutions for any of the aggravations from this DVD player would be appreciated.

If your best solution is to trash it, then I'd appreciate some ideas of which player on the market that might last longer than 5-6 years!
For those suggestions let me give you an idea of how we use the player: JUST to play movies on, sometimes 1-2 movies a month, sometimes we are "couch potatoes" and may watch 3 movies in a row. We don't have cable, tivo or any of that other "fancy" stuff ... have one of those Video RF Modulators hooking DVD player to RCA tv. Don't use parental controls -- We're both way over 21, and our parents don't care what we watch! I think the TV is mono sound, although it might have two speakers ... like I said, I'd forgotten the dvd player was also a CD player ... obviously never hooked up any extra for that part, and probably never will.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
jaws