Printer-Camera conundrum

Discussion in 'Printers, Scanners and Digital Cameras' started by AleXYZ, Sep 20, 2010.

  1. AleXYZ

    AleXYZ Geek Trainee

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    Hello all.

    So here's a little problem to get you thinking about. More info available on request. Firstly I'm pretty competent with computers, but I'm much more of a software/programming guy than hardware.

    Anyway, I recently bought an acer 8935G which comes with a built in crystal eye webcam. This all works fine, and did for about 3 months. Then one day (around when I started using my printer, an HP C3180) my computer stopped being able to detect the camera (at least that what it seemed like at the time).

    When it happened I didn't make any connection with the printer, but a couple of the keys were dodgy anyway so I sent it back to acer under warranty, and got the keyboard replaced and the webcam repaired. They told me all the webcam hardware was fine and it was now working fine (though they didn't elaborate if it hadn't been fine before).

    I got it back, camera worked fine, I plugged in my printer and BAM!, webcam stops being recognized. If I unplug the printer and send the computer to sleep/hibernate occasionally the webcam is re-initialized, but more often than not I need to restart the computer (W7) for it to be recognized. I'd love to look at how it runs together in Linux but sadly I'm having major problems with the fan working effectively under Ubuntu so I'd rather not unless people think it would be really helpful.

    Basically I'm stumped - I don't have a lot of experience regarding hardware/cameras but I really don't know what the deal is here - the printer works fine, and worked on my old computer with a (different) USB webcam no problem, I recently was away from my printer and the webcam worked without a problem for two months. I've tried the printer in multiple USBs and had various things running in various USBs while I was away from the printer no problem.

    Any ideas at all would be greatly appreciated - the error message I get is "Camera no found" (yes, "no found", not "not found") which seems to be kind of common with a similar error. If we can identify what's causing this it might be really useful to the Crystal eye community!

    Anyway, thanks for reading this far, any advice, extra info or words of condolence greatly appreciated!

    Alex
     

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