We got new desktop systems at work a while back, and I hooked my webcam back up to the new system, but never bothered setting up the software for it since it rarely gets used. Well I’ll need to do a demo soon where it’ll be useful, so I find the installer and run it and…”This product requires a USB port. Please make sure your USB port is working before launching setup again.” Um, I’m pretty sure the USB ports work on this thing. Some searching reveals that it’s probably because this new system is UEFI, and this is an old driver package (circa 2009) that probably doesn’t know how to check for USB ports properly. I double-check that ‘Legacy USB’ support is enabled in the BIOS, but that doesn’t help. There’s a newer 2.x version of the webcam software and it installs just fine, but doesn’t recognize this old model, and support suggests that I specifically need that old 1.x package.
Well maybe I can just install the drivers manually, I figure. I extract the files out of the installer, notice that there’s a “RequireUSB=1” setting in the setup.ini file, try setting that to 0, and rerun the setup, and yay, it no longer gets blocked at that USB check. It starts to go through the normal install dialogs, except…there’s no ‘Next’ button on any of the screens even though it tells me to press ‘Next’. Hitting enter works to proceed to the next dialog until I get to the EULA screen, where I have to specifically click the ‘Agree’ radio button and then I can’t tab back to the invisible Next button, so I’m stuck again. Trying various compatibility modes doesn’t help.
The setup program just seems to be a launcher for various MSI files in the package though, so I go to the ‘Drivers’ and ‘Software’ subdirectories, run the .msi files there, and those all seem to install just fine. I run the webcam UI program, and…no webcam detected. Check device manager, and the webcam model name does now show up, but only as a ‘controller’, not an ‘imaging device’, and there’s still an ‘Unknown device’ whose USB ID matches that of the webcam. Somehow it’s managed to identify the specific webcam model as a USB hub, and the built-in mic, but not as an actual camera. The ‘Installing New Hardware’ systray notification also has an error about not being able to install the driver, but I change the settings there to also search Windows Update. It goes off and grinds on that for a while…and still fails to find a driver to install.
Cue several rounds of uninstalling and reinstalling the packages and trying different ports and other things, with no luck. Finally, I go to Device Manager, notice the ‘Update Driver Software’ option there, give it a try on the unknown device…and now it successfully finds and installs a driver, even though it couldn’t via Windows Update (I’d assumed it would have been the same process). But it does all work now, at least.
Webcams always seem to be among the worst devices for long-term support, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at least partly forced obsolescence because otherwise there wouldn’t be as much of a reason to upgrade to a new marginally-better webcam…