Jump to content

Webcam in Windows 2000


Recommended Posts

It seems that the idiots at Creative have decided not to provide any Windows 2000 drivers for any of their current webcam range. I thought the whole point of WDM was so that one driver could be created and it would work on multiple Windows versions, so I don't know why Creative have gone out of their way to make a driver that is XP only.

I notice that some webcams are supposedly driverless (i.e. USB Video Class) but this requires support in the OS.

Is there a USB Video Class driver set that will work with Windows 2000?, or failing that can a regular XP webcam driver be hacked somehow to work on Windows 2000?

I tried doing an inf install using the drivers that were supplied, but they were not recognised as compatible with the device.

:angry:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 years later...

Bump ;) I have a Chicony USB Webcam (on a Toshiba Satellite A200) that I haven't been able to put work trying several drivers. And on Ubuntu linux the webcam works out-of-the-box, so the solution should not be that difficult (or is it?).

Edited by piete
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some time ago I managed to install a newer Logitech camera using XP drivers. I had to unpack them and use Device Manager to manually search for files. They were located in several different folders but finally the camera started to work, except for the internal microphone.

If there are no drivers for 2K I suggest trying to force installation of the XP ones through Device Manager.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the hint, I may start looking for XP drivers. The computer has only Vista, and that driver wouldn't install (actually I can only try to install a camera application, but there is a driver folder but the driver refuses to install, I wonder if this KDW hack would allow me to install it?).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Vista drivers won't work for sure ;) You need the ones for XP. The application probably won't work so it would be better to try installing only the drivers through Device Manager.

Edited by tomasz86
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I uninstalled the camera application even in Vista, it is not that necessary. The drivers it has may or may not be for the webcam, since even Ubuntu recognizes the camera the drivers may be generic (that Win2K unfortunately doesn't have).

You could complain HP for many things, but one thing they have very well catered are drivers, the provide them for several versions of Windows. At the Toshiba website I can find almost nothing. I have a few HP Compaq notebooks that I can "distro-hop" with, but with this Toshiba I'm stuck with Vista (I don't have XP to try with Toshiba, only HP OEM).

The reason I started to want to use more Windows 2000 alongside the Vista installation is the infamous utorrent freezing problem. I got a bigger HD, tried to transfer my OS's (Vista, 2K and Ubuntu) by imaging but bumped into the explorer.exe not starting problem with Vista, spent some time trying to resolve it until I gave up and made a fresh install only to bump into the utorrent problem (I remember having bumped into it earlier but I don't remember wasting the time I managed to waste this weekend without resolving the problem). On Win2K utorrent runs well together with Avast without any tweaks so it can't be the culprit either (I even ran Vista without Avast, and utorrent froze the machine nevertheless).

Now I digressed a bit, but to summarize, if I get Windows 2000 to run well enough on my Toshiba laptop, I won't be needing Vista at all. "Well enough" means at the moment only the webcam (with the microphone) and getting the temperature down by 10 centigrades (RMClock gives 48 degrees on Vista and 60-62 on Win2K with lowest frequency undervolted, at least RMClock says so), any hints how to get the temperature down are very welcome :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Now I digressed a bit, but to summarize, if I get Windows 2000 to run well enough on my Toshiba laptop, I won't be needing Vista at all. "Well enough" means at the moment only the webcam (with the microphone) and getting the temperature down by 10 centigrades (RMClock gives 48 degrees on Vista and 60-62 on Win2K with lowest frequency undervolted, at least RMClock says so), any hints how to get the temperature down are very welcome :)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919521

If you don't like to edit the registry manually you can use this unofficial hotfix:

Windows2000-KB919521-x86-Global.exe (467 KB)

Edited by tomasz86
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks! If that works it leaves only the webcam as a show-stopper! I can verify it only after I get home, but I report how it went here.

Actually I haven't even run the WSUS offline updates on that (also fresh) installation, and I can't remember if I included any updates on the installation cd (it is a modified one due to the SATA drivers but it was so long ago that can't remember what I did with it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I applied the hotfix, and the results are a bit mixed so far:

- Yesterday evening after applying the hotfix and running all pending updates the temperature didn't come down, it stayed at 62-63 degrees

- Today in the morning after a cool night the first boot had the temperature around 50 degrees, and idled for a while at 47 degrees (on Vista I don't even remember getting below 48)!

- A subsequent boot raised the temperature to the 70s (this happens also on my other laptop, HP Compaq NC8430 with an ATI video chip, but the temperature eventually lowers to the levels of XP and Vista), BUT could reach only 56-57 degrees during the while I used the computer experimenting with webcam drivers.

So, even though the temperature did come down, the effect seems not sufficient. On the other hand, the cpu was on a moderate load unpacking archives so I cannot tell the long-term effect yet.

And no luck with the webcam yet. Is there no 2K user with a working Chicony USB webcam? (BTW, the microphone does work already, I installed the first Realtek sound driver I found with success)

Edit: Forgot to mention that 2K recognizes the Chicony webcam, and even offers a seemingly correct driver in the "known drivers list" option, but fails to install. Could there exist a fix to this?

Edit2: I got my hopes high as I found some XP drivers on the Toshiba website (one even specifically for my notebook model). Unfortunately none of the drivers worked. :(

Edited by piete
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am wondering if I should try KDW or KernelEx, are they of any help in this case, where XP drivers exist (and I couldn't get them work on their own)? Or could there be any workaround "borrowing" some XP components? I am not very experienced with this so I would need some guidance. Really, the only thing preventing Windows 2000 to become my main OS on this Toshiba laptop is the non-functional webcam.

post-155985-0-43600200-1312073323_thumb.

Edit: Added the error message that appeared after trying to install the XP drivers

Edited by piete
Link to comment
Share on other sites

piete,

this error is connected with the webcam related (?) program (traybar.exe) which is probably not needed anyway. You could just remove it form the autostart. Is the cam still not working after installing the XP drivers? Have you tried adding them manually through Device Manager?

BWC's KernelEx won't help you here as the problem is not related to kernel32.dll. I'm not sure about KDW but the problem here is not this file 'traybar.exe' which as I said before shouldn't matter at all.

Edited by tomasz86
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yes, the error message goes away uninstalling the camera assistant software. I was just hoping that if the software installed (and ran) properly, maybe the camera would work, too. And no, the camera still doesn't work, even trying to install the driver manually with device manager from the assistant's driver folder (the setup files don't have an .inf file to install drivers only). Or trying to install with device manager the numerous different drivers I have downloaded :)

I tried to experiment with the default drivers Win2K offers, like I mentioned earlier the Chicony driver fails to install, but I managed to make the computer believe it had a Creative webcam, even skype believed it and showed a black camera screen instead of telling that I didn't have a webcam. Unfortunately the blue led that indicates that the camera is working didn't lit so I didn't get a picture. And the camera item in device manager gets so messy that I have to clean the drivers better than the default uninstall in order to get another shot.

By the way, I'm just trying to install Driversweeper, when I try to run it, it says that it cannot find mscoree.dll, could somebody help with this? Or recommend a working driver sweeper program to get rid of a non-working usb driver?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Could you send (post an URL to) the webcam setup file you're trying to install? There must be a driver somewhere inside it.

As for Driversweeper and mscoree.dll, the latter file is included in .NET Framework 2.0. You can install .NET 2.0 with updates from the link in my signature (Windows 2000: .NET Framework)

Edited by tomasz86
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi! Here's the link:

http://support1.toshiba-tro.de/tedd-files2/0/webcam-20070809133519.zip (the link didn't work now that I tried it again)

And here's some conversation for background info:

http://forums.computers.toshiba-europe.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=24161

I got driversweeper working, but it didn't help with the webcam driver. Any other ideas? :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...