MISSING cd Drive

hi guys, i have 2 small problems i wonder if u could help me with. firstly the laptop i have is a sony vaio vgn-fj3m .when i got it it had XP on it, i then stuck vista on , no problem, then i put win 7 on and i have a few glitches. 1) the cd drive is not showing up at all, not in the device manager. i have checked that its activated in the bios start up. ive done the upper , lower filters jobbie with the registry and ive tried drivers but nothing. i also tried another cd drive with no results and finally i tried extracting a driver from the vista disc which worked for the wireless set up. thats the first one. . the laptop is about 7 years old and still has life in it but these probs are a pain.
many thanks for your help in advance...TG

hi there thanks for reply/ i formatted HD for a clean install but i had to use a CD drive connected via usb from another p.c..... all updates have been installed. daft thing is it worked with xp and vista. during aanother post i made about windows seven problems, i was told that this laptop could be struggling with w7 and could nt upgrade anymore even though i added more RAM. i use mozzilla and it keeps saying ( not responding ) and if i touch a key it freezes for a few seconds, i dont think its a browser problem because i tried Chrome and it does exacly the same. could w7 be pushing this unit to much.. many thanks

Many thanks. I'm off to bed now, hard day, so I.will.do.tomorrow. many thanks

many thanks BRITTON30 for your reply. well i did what you said about removing the drive and then install it after na power down but same again, it doesnt recognise it . at this point it must be crying out that the drive is faulty. i did try it with a sony cd drive as it came with a panasonic one, thinking it would work with the sony as the laptops a sony.. it worked with the xp and vista versions, like a said i was going to see if i could load the vista driver but i have to locate the drive first .