SlowCD

The SlowCD application was designed to be a small tool that lets you set the speed of most CD-Rom drives.
You have to supply command line options to SlowCD in order to get it to work. If you just run the executable it will tell you what the syntax is:
SlowCD [speed]
Host is the host-adapter the drive is on, and target is the number of the drive on the adapter. The speeds are all transfer rates, so 1x would be 176. Not all drives agree on how to multiply 176 with another number (*giggle*), so you might have to try out some different numbers. E.g. to set my drive to 10x speed I have to use speed 1764.
SlowCD will check the speed after it has set it, and report if the number the drive returns does not equal the desired speed. This can be used to find out if your drive supports a given speed setting, and to find out the exact number to use.
If you omit the speed parameter you get some information about the drive.
So e.g. if you run
SlowCD 0 0
you will get the name, max speed and current speed of the drive at 0:0.
You can set the speed by running e.g.:
SlowCD 0 0 1764
which would set my drive to 10x speed.