I have exactly the same problem with the same spec laptop.

I called Dell Tech support and they sent out an engineer to replace the Blu Ray drive but it still happens with the new drive.

I would be very interested to know if anyone has a solution for this.

yeah it spins up, then spins down again. It does this with DVDs too.

It also seems to do this as windows is starting up.

Maybe we'll solve this together!

If you have the BD in the drive , w/o PowerDVD running, does the PC try and access the disk every minute or so?

I actually have a full version of PowerDVD 9 and it still happens with that.

The full version of PowerDVD 9 is far superior than the PowerDVD DX supplied by Dell though. The Dell supplied one was incredibly slow and unresponsive.

I have emailed Tech Support, interesting for you that the problem hasnt gone away with a new drive..

I don't know if it would be solved using the full version of PowerDVD 9, as opposed to this weired version 8 supplied by Dell?

I think the core issue is the fact that it keeps spinning up and spinning down without PowerDVD open.

It probably just continues this behavior when playing a movie causing PowerDVD to temporarily lose control of the drive.

arcsoft total media 3 blu ray software does exactly the same, so its not a PowerDVD / software issue.

I have emailed Dell Tech Support:

So Far they have advisied I update the Bios, I already have the latest version, and they said reinstall PowerDVD...

so, I have now emailed them the link of this thread. We will get this sorted! Are all of you in the UK?

:-(

I'm in the UK and have also emailed the link to this thread to Dell tech support.

Back in the old IDE days, this behavior was due to a DVD drive running in PIO mode, but in the SATA world, that should not happen.