Cleaning a CD or DVD drive on a laptop is easy -- probably the easiest of any drive. Unlike desktop drives, car/vehicle CD players, or DVD players/recorders, the laser lens and assembly is not buried within a pile of metal and plastic that must be unscrewed and dismantled.
Most modern laptop/notebook DVD burners are built "backwards" from their desktop counterparts. The laser assembly is visible on the slide-out tray. In fact, the tray itself is really the DVD burner -- the rest of the "drive" is just brackets and screws to hold everything in place, with some sort of spring/latch to keep it firmly in place when in use.
For example, this is the drive on my laptop (laser assembly highlighted in the blue box):
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And here's a closeup of the laser lens "eye" that needs cleaning.
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... and then simply follow the instructions from the first post.
Start with the the sentence "Get yourself some alcohol..." under the photo of the isopropyl alcohol bottle.
That's all there is to it!
HOWEVER...
It should be noted that this may not solve your disc reading/writing problems. Laptop drives are notoriously finicky with media, especially when a laptop DVD burner is trying to read a burned homemade CD-R. To call my laptop DVD burner a "piece of crap" would almost be an understatement. In addition to merely being a laptop burner, it's also a laptop burner made by LG -- one of the worst performing laptop drives I've ever come across, and a common source of complaints found online in blogs and forums by end users.
This is why I carry a good "non-slim" external DVD burner with me, whenever I'm sure to need to burn or read some discs, and don't have the luxury of gambling my chances that the LG drive wants to cooperate. For example, the
Pioneer DVR-X152 external USB 2.0 DVD burner (around $60 shipped, new), or
Pioneer DVR-X162Q external (pre-owned).