Acer notebook webcam

[Steve M]

A friend of mine has an Acer Notebook Aspire 5315. It has a CrystalEye webcam, which shows up when I go into Control Panel>Hardware and Sound>Devices and Printers. However we can't seem to activate it. According to the internet there should be some Acer software under Start>All Programs to get it started but there wasn't. The Acer website had some drivers to download but doesn't really say what they do or how to use them. I downloaded some but they don't seem to have anything to do with the camera.
   Can anyone help us get the camera rolling?

[DaveLembke]

If you have the original system restore media for this laptop, you can restore it back to factory software after first backing up all data to an external hard drive or thumb drive. If the camera works, then the software would be there as part of the original build. Maybe someone uninstalled it accidentally etc.

I ran into similar issues trying to get drivers for a Sony Video Capture Card that came with a Sony Desktop computer that was running only a Pentium 4 processor. Sony did not make any of the software available for easy download and the only way to get the software needed to make this capture card work was to get the software and drivers off of the original system restore media set. The problem I had though was that I wanted to use this capture card in a newer build and the software and drivers were bundled and protected within a system restore DVD set so they couldnt be easily extracted and used on a different computer. Needless to say the capture card is worthless without the original computer to run it     Even tried a Linux distro called Freevo to see if I could use it like a TiVo in an older computer running this Linux distro off of live CD and it would initialize the card, but thats all, everything else was broken. FreeVo was last updated a few years after this capture card was created so I hoped that it would support it.

I have a feeling that Acer bundled the Software and Drivers as part of the original system restore image, and so the only way to get it back if it was removed is to restore the computer back to factory build just the same way it ran fresh out of the box when purchased to reinstall the software and drivers.

If no media set is available, it may have a utility to burn a system recovery set, otherwise you may also be able to buy a recovery set off of acer for a fee of around $40 if they dont offer this for free under warranty that may still be active.

[Steve M]

The computer was bought second hand, and was wiped clean before purchase, so he doesn't have any of the stuff it originally came with.

[patio]

The hidden recovery partition may very well still be there...
Look up the Model # at Acer for instructions on accessing it.

[DaveLembke]

The computer was bought second hand, and was wiped clean before purchase, so he doesn't have any of the stuff it originally came with.

The hidden recovery partition may very well still be there...
Look up the Model # at Acer for instructions on accessing it.

If an OS disc was used other than the Acer Recovery Set then the Recovery Partition could be gone if partitions were all wiped or hard drive replaced to make a total clean build. If the recovery partition is still available as Patio suggested you might get lucky and still have it there usually as D: and labeled as such when looking at drive names. I have seen many rebuilds that were rebuilt from clean OS install which are missing the bundled software which is the problem you have now.

You may have to contact acer and act as if you are the original owner and lost the recovery software and need a new copy. This is usually like $40 unless under warranty in which it might be free replacement for the software.