Issue
I bought this notebook for a repair and resale. When I asked a seller about the laptop’s history, his reply was “It just stopped working”. As it later turned out, it had numerous problems, one of them being a faulty webcam. After the Northbridge chip replacement the laptop started working. During a testing process, I noticed the webcam isn’t working in Skype; there was no video and the webcam’s control light wasn’t lit. In the Device manager there should be a HP webcam-101 device under the imaging devices or at least an unknown device with an exclamation mark beside it (a possible driver issue).
Webcam’s absence in the device manager points to a hardware failure. There are four possible scenarios in cases like this, written from the most likely to less:
- A faulty webcam module
- A damaged cable connecting the webcam to the motherboard
- A webcam cable was disconnected from one of two connectors 1 2
- Micro-cracks in solder balls connecting the Southbridge chip to the motherboard as a result of a mechanical shock