Why won't my computer register my webcam?

i had this same problem. this really has been a great laptop in the now 6 years that i have owned it.

anyways…

i thought it was a problem with the drivers between windows 8.1 and windows 10 because of the computer shipped with windows 8.1 and then an update to windows 10 was offered since microsoft borked 8.1 so bad. i disliked windows 8.1 so updated to windows 10 immediately.

this turned out to be a simple fix that DROVE ME NUTS! i kept getting the error that the webcam was not attached and i couldn’t even find it under the device manager.

i even did a registry edit trying to get the computer to find it.

well…all it was was the camera was switched off in the bios

with the bios having switched off the camera windows had no way of even accessing the camera. i guess at some point i had switched off the camera in the bios because of privacy concerns.

so all you have to do is this:

shutdown your computer and hold the ‘shift” key while doing so.

if you don’t do this then the computer doesn’t do a full shut down.

when the computer shuts down wait a few seconds.

then press the power button to turn it back on.

immediately start pressing the ‘F2’ key until the bios screen appears.

the bios screen should come up

click “advanced”

then click “system configuration”

and your web cam should be right there to switch on and off.

anyways…. i hope this helps

it took me a few months to figure this out.