DVD stuck in machine

Question

Just bought a Mac b/c everyone told us how great they are. All we have had is problems with the DVD player. I know there are other threads about this, but none of the solutions seem to work.
1.The DVD player does not come up and does not recognise that a DVD is in the machine.
2. Disc utility is useless b/c the DVD disc does not register as an open drive
3. Restarted held mouse down does not work
4. Shut down and held mouse button down does not work.
5 Hit eject button numerous times
6 Intel based so the method they suggest in the help question does not work
7 Disk drive is slot on side of screen, no manual eject button.
8. EXTREMELY FRUSTRATED!!!
Any new suggestions short of taking it back to Apple and getting a PC will be gratefully welcomed.

Answer 1

This is the third flaw in my new Intel iMac two of which I have reported earlier:
1) The CD:s and DVD:s are stuck in the superdrive due to warping. My iMac Super drive runs so hot that CD:s and DVD:s which have a full disk label taped on them will warp due to different heat expansion of paper and plastic. I have a number of disks of this kind from an American university and I cannot use them in my iMac. They are stuck inside the superdrive within a few minutes. The same disks work fine in my old PowerTowerPro OS9 machine or in any other machine with a cool superdrive.
So far I have the following options to fix the problem:
1a) Make copies of the disks somewhere without paper labels. Big task. Disks with no paper label on them work fine on my iMac.
1b) Buy a new La Cie FireWire superdrive, 105 euros.
1c) Increase the cooling of the existing superdrive. Does anyone know if there is a terminal command to increase the speed of the fans?
1d) Try to remove the paper labels from the disks. My first attempt failed. I washed a disk with hot water to get the label soft to scrape it away. The disk did not warp any more in the iMac superdrive but some of the data was lost (not all).
Any better solutions?
The two earlier problems were:
2) The Apple keyboard produced multiple characters on the screen with one key stroke. This happened especially with the left hand keys like a and s. Replacing the keyboard with another Apple keyboard did not help. A Logitech keyboard did not produce multiple characters (and would help) but I finally found another solution with the help of FiMug-people: I set the "Slow Keys ON" in the system preferences and adjusted the smallest possible delay to prevent multiple characters appearing. This is not a good solution but will do. If Logitech keyboard works OK there must be a design flaw in the Apple keyboard.
3) My iMac started to kernel panic when in sleep (did not wake up from sleep). I tried several remedies given on these forums but none did help. I finally found a simple solution: I adjusted the Energy saver to Apple defaults: Both the display and the iMac to go to sleep if unused for 10 minutes. (Previously I had 10 minutes for the display and 15 min for the computer).
24" Intel iMac   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   2 Gb of RAM