Help with Dell integrated webcam

Factual Questions
1

I have a Dell Inspiron 7786 2-in-1 laptop running Windows 10. It supposedly includes an integrated webcam and I can see the camera lens at the top of my screen, but I have never tried to use it before. When I try to use the camera, or go into Camera in the Start Menu, I get a message saying that the camera can’t be found. I have done a lot of Googling, installed necessary updates on my system and updated the camera drivers, but still no camera.

Can anyone help me figure out what is going on, and if there is anything I can do to get my camera to work?

2

Can you go Settings…Privacy…Camera and make sure “Allow access to the camera on this device” is set to on? Once you have done this, make sure that “Allow apps to access your camera” and any apps you want to use with it are turned on.

3

Thanks for your help.

All of those settings are set to on, but when I go to camera it says “We can’t find your camera”. The error code is 0A00F4244<NoCamerasAreAttached>

Is there a way to tell if I even have a camera? I’m sure this laptop is supposed to come with one installed.

4

Check the BIOS. Is a camera shown there? And check if it’s disabled (although that’s unlikely). It’s possible to disable the webcam in the BIOS, in which case Windows won’t see it at all.

5

So I spent over an hour on the phone with Dell Support. They had me run a lot of updates, and the camera actually appeared in Device Manager and I was able to get it working. But then it disappeared again and I was able to get it back with a restart. Now it has disappeared again. The good news is that I now know that I have a camera installed, and it works fine. The bad news is that I can’t figure out why it keeps disappearing from Device Manager and Windows can’t find it.

If anyone has any ideas, I’m open for suggestions.

6

That your software sometimes sees it suggests to me that it’s a hardware failure. It’s possible that there’s a loose connection somewhere.

7

I was thinking that the fact that it was working intermittently meant that there wasn’t a hardware problem, but this makes sense to me. I was able to do a video chat today, so I guess I’ll just have to play it by ear until I’m able to take it in to have it looked at.

Thanks for responding.