Q: MacBook Pro is slow and DVD not working

Hello deacon303,

I understand that you are trying to troubleshoot someone else's mac and you need a little help getting that up and running. I can point you in the right direction to continue your troubleshooting.

As far as the slowness, I have three articles for you to look at. The first goes over some general suggestions on what to look for when a Mac is running slowly. It will have you look to see if the hard drive is fun as well as looking at Activity Monitor to see if an app is taking a huge demand on the system. The second article does expand and using Activity Monitor.  The third article will give a more overall troubleshooting on verifying the startup disk. I know it talks about what to do when a Mac does not fully boot up, but the steps are helpful as well when the system seems slow. 

OS X El Capitan: If your Mac runs slowly
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22145

Apps can affect Mac performance, battery runtime, temperature, and fan activity
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203184

Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203176​

As far as the troubleshooting of the SuperDrive, the next article will help you out with that. It will make reference to using a USB version that Apple offers, but the troubleshooting is the exact same. 

Get help with the slot-loading SuperDrive on your Mac computer
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201788

Take care