MacBook Pro disk burner failure

I upgraded OS-X from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 and suddenly my DVD burner wouldn't burn disks. It would create them but fail in the verification step. Trying the resulting disk in another machine confirmed that it was bad. I initially thought this was due to the update as I was also having other troubles now. Then I read through a discussion entry on the Apple site that pointed out that a number of people had dirty drives that didn't manifest themselves until the update.

Just to be sure, I put a 10.5.6 machine in target disk mode and booted my machine from it. The disk burner still failed.

I looked over a tear down video from MacSales to see what it'd take to get to the internal DVD drive. I also looked at the cover removal of the drive itself at http://muzso.hu/2008/08/17/how-to-clean-the-lens-of-a-slot-loading-optical-drive-a-macbook-pros-superdrive. Great stuff but too much work. The muzso.hu article had great pictures like this one:

The author circled the disk head in red -- note that it's not in the center but at the lower left. Getting out my compressed air, I inserted the straw through the slot on the left and gently blew it out with short bursts. That did the trick and the drive works again.

Nov. 11, 2015 update: The slot is at the bottom. As noted in the muss.hu link above, one can also use a moistened lens cleaning cloth wrapped around a thin card to reach the lens. Works quickly and well!