Nowadays, almost all software are being shipped on CD-ROMs. Also many of them run from the CD- drive itself. This has led to a lot of people complaining that the software runs terribly slowly, even if they have a 24X drive. Given below are certain hints that should improve the performance.
 

1. There are usually two IDE channels on your motherboard - The Primary & the Secondary. Your boot up hard disk will be connected to the Primary IDE interface. Most of the installations, I have seen, have the CD-ROM drives configured as Slave to the hard disk(which is the Master). This means the CD-ROM is also connected to the same IDE interface as the hard disk. When this is done, both the HDD and the CD-ROM drive, utilize the resources allocated to the Primary interface, naturally leading to a degradation in performance. Henc eit is always recommended to connect the CD-ROM drive to the secondary IDE channel, & configuring the drive as Master. This setup makes sure that the CD-ROM drive and the HDD use separate dedicated resources, increasing system performance by noticable levels. This increase in performance is clearly visible when playing Video CDs of the CD-ROM drive.
2. When the CD-ROM drive, or for that matter the floppy drive, is in use, the processor is also working hectically, consuming a lot of system resources. So in such circumstances running multiple applications may not be such a good idea. There has been quite a few problems of system hangs in such cases. As far as possible limit running apps to those which are absolutely necessary. If you tend to run more than 2-3 apps at the same time, getting more RAM is recommended(64 Mb should do). As RAM prices have fallen to rock bottom levels, this should not be an expensive investment.
3. Also keep this in mind. Your PC CD-ROM drives are optimized for random seek and read. Playing audio CDs on your drive, means hours of sequential access. Though PC CD-ROMs are capable of sequential reads, prolonged usage, might result in wear out of the head.
4. Finally, every CD-ROM drive in the market can never perform upto their rated levels. Manufacturers specify only the transfer rate achieved on the outer most track of the CDs. Very rarely is any software present on the outermost tracks of the CD. So real world performance of the drive will be much less than the advertised index.