My cd and dvd player is not working. i have a toshiba laptop with windows vista. please advise. thank you.

If by not working you mean that the drive physically works fine, will eject and stays closed when you put a disk in, but does not read the disk or gives errors when it tries, then a simple cleaning could be enough to revive it. A lens cleaning cd is easy enough to find at any local department store and running this in the drive should take care of any problems reading disks unless the disks themselves are damaged.

If however you meant that the drive doesn't respond to eject requests, either when pressing the button, or choosing "eject" in windows, then the hardware itself is at fault and will need to be replaced. The drive is easy to swap out with a replacement or you could even get a portable external drive and only connect it when you actually need to use the disk. Also if the cleaning suggested above doesn't help, and you are sure the disks you are trying are not dirty or scratched to heavily on the bottom, then a replacement drive would also be in order.