Acer Crystal Eye goes blind

December 28, 2007 11:32 PM

What is going on with my Acer Crystal Eye webcam? It suddenly died and won't revive again.

I have an Acer TravelMate 6291 laptop that's only a few months old, running Windows Vista (Home, 32-bit). It has an in-built Crystal Eye webcam and accompanying software, which I used regularly.

About a week ago I was using Skype when the webcam suddenly died. Yesterday I tried using it again, and I got a Camera Not Found error. After Googling and looking up Acer's help for answers (most of which applied to other laptops and were in other languages), I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers many, many times. I even tried the trick of emptying my Pictures folder.

Once in that whole mess did the webcam work again. But only once. Now, even though I have the correct drivers installed and it shows up on Device Manager, when I try to load the webcam app I get the following error messages:

HR: 80040217

followed by

Camera is busy!

And then the program shuts down.

What am I missing? Is my webcam forever buggered? I've tried updating the drivers (Suyin) via Windows but it says it's up to date.

posted by divabat to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Tried it on another computer/OS?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:46 PM on December 28, 2007

Ops! Just ignore what I wrote above.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:52 PM on December 28, 2007

Possessing neither a laptop or a webcam (nor using the Vista upgrade I have, for that matter), I lob this suggestion at the problem: whenever scanners have that error, in my experience, it has been due to another process accessing it or a low power situation. Does the webcam show up in Device Manager? Are there any applications/threads that could be interfering? For that matter, would a System Restore to a point before the trouble started help?
posted by bonobo at 2:32 AM on December 29, 2007

bonobo: It does show up on Device Manager. I did wonder if it was due to another process, but I can't seem to find any process that would use the camera.

I'm not sure if I turned System Restore on, and I can't pinpoint the exact date.
posted by divabat at 4:28 AM on December 30, 2007