PS3 disc drive woes.

Okay, so I was all excited because I had acquired a copy of Black Ops, and I was going to play it this weekend. I popped it into my PS3, played it for a couple hours (mostly campaign, but a little bit o'zombies), and for the most part all was fine.  
 
But then when I was exiting from Dead Ops Arcade back to the main menu, the game froze on me. So, I thought, "Glitchy game. Oh well, I'll just reboot the system." So I did, but then it didn't acknowledge that there was a disc in the system. So, I took it out, and put it back in. Nothing.  
 
At this point, I began to think that I had a defective disc. So, I took it out, and put in Red Dead Redemption. And the system recognized it. Then I decided to try Black Ops again, and lo and behold, it recognized it. But it was getting kind of late at that point, so I just turned it off, and went to bed. 
 
The next day (this morning) I decided to try the multiplayer. So I did, the game started up fine, and I got into a couple matches, and they seemed to run smoothly enough. But then the game froze on me on the loading screen after finishing a match. So I rebooted the system, and it wasn't recognizing the disc again. So I tried RDR, and it wasn't recognizing that either. Then, I tried MGS4 (didn't work), and tried a DVD (Excalibur), and neither of those worked.  
 
But then I tried Black Ops again, and it worked! But when I went back into the campaign, it started not loading conversations, or even the subtitles. So, I decided that since it is pretty story focused, I'd reload the level.  
 
And it froze.  
 
I did try it again a few hours later (after starting New Vegas on my 360), and I was able to make it through most of the level I was on, but then the same thing started to happen. 
 
So, the point of this long story is that there's something wrong with my PS3, and so far as I can tell, it involves the disc drive. I have one of the classic 60GB PS3s, and I've been using it for about three and a half years now (meaning it's out of warranty). Does anyone reading this have any advice? I'd rather not have to buy another one, and anything that would involve my dismantling and repairing it would surely go wrong, because I'm not very good with things of that nature.  
  
It's so sad. After all these years of defending the PS3 against naysayers, mine is on the way out. It's ironic, because it was my first 360 red ringing that tipped me over to "The Dark Side" as I like to call it.  
 
:'( I am the crying face.