My laptop has developed a stuttering problem in Windows. I've re-installed my audio and video drivers as well as my various DVD software.

I experience some choppiness in Kubuntu, but I chalk that up to it being Linux.

My Toshiba has built-in media player software (so that I don't need to boot into Windows) and it runs it just fine.

Any ideas?

Have you looked in the task manager to see what processes are taking up the most CPU? Sometimes something gets installed or turned on that sucks up a lot of processing power and turning that off can help (I'm looking at you, antivirus programs). Yeah I know you've probably already tried this but it's all I can think of.

Check that the drive has DMA mode on and working.

Clean it.

Hey, I had a problem like this with my Toshiba laptop too. DVD players for computers use two different lenses (or something, I don't really understand it), one for CDs and one for DVDs, and the one for DVDs got scratched (or at least that's what I think happened). Toshiba puts really crappy noname DVD players in their laptops (or at least mine), and the problem got really bad to the point where I couldn't even use a data dvd. I never got it fixed.

Maybe you're having the same problem? When it was choppy for me the DVD player started sounding really loud.

I don't really know anything about DVD drives so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong guys.

I'd say it's a scratched or dirty lens if Toshiba's proprietary software had the same problem, but it doesn't - it plays them just fine.