loading stupor & fund drive

I bought Seasons a few days ago, but have yet to be able to enjoy it. The only computer in the house that can handle Sims 2 is the wife's laptop from college, which is fast approaching its fourth birthday. The poor thing struggles a little to keep up with everything the game wants to do, but is workable (though it gets so overheated that i had to buy a desk fan to blow on the computer just to keep it from shutting itself off in an act of self preservation). Never mind that the first time I installed Seasons it decided to Uninstall Pets for me... a quick removal of all things Sims 2 and a ground-up reinstallation of everything solved that.

My problem, and the reason I'm posting this, is that I can't get my computer to start the game for me. Of the two to three dozen times I've tried starting Seasons it's only let me in twice. Once I'm in everything works as well as can be expected for this computer, but getting it to load seems almost impossible. What happens is that the computer starts loading the game as normal, but after the initial splash graphic disappears, the CD drive goes into some kind of stupor. The LED for the CD drive won't go off, indicating that it thinks it's working, but the drive slows down into not-being-used-right-now mode. While this is happening it's impossible to do anything other than move the cursor around the screen. The only way to regain control of the computer is to eject the CD, which gives me the "you need to have the CD in the drive to play this game, you moron..." alert window. This isn't the first time this has happened to me either. It started when I bought Nightlife well over a year ago, and even persisted after a complete reformatting of the hard drive. In the past I've usually been able to get into the game after a few tries, but now it seems to be next to impossible to get past this barrier.

I realize that this is probably a hardware problem, and that getting a new computer would solve this (and a whole slew of other problems) for me. I'm hoping that someone out there knows of a way to make the hardware play nice with the game. My other option is to just buy a new computer that works, but I'm not a wealthy man and can't afford to do that without the generous outpouring of donations from other members of this site. I'm willing to take donations to the "Buy slurpeefiend a New Computer Fund" if any of you are interested in that (send me a pm and we'll talk about it). If not, I'd be grateful for advice any of you could give me on how to get my game started, or how to quickly and easily raise the money for a new computer.