How to Fix a Webcam On a Windows 8 PC

There can be several reasons because of which Windows 8 might fail to detect a webcam that was earlier working absolutely fine on Windows 7 computer. The main reason, but not the only one, behind this issue can be the incompatible web cam driver.

Even if a fresh copy of Windows 8 is installed, the operating system may fail to detect the webcam because of obsolete and/or older version of the hardware drivers.

To overcome such situations, a new version of the webcam driver can be manually downloaded from the Internet. After downloading, the driver can be installed by locating the downloaded file manually during the driver installation process.

Another option can be that administrators can initiate the web cam driver update process, and let Windows 8 search for the appropriate driver from the Internet automatically.

The above discussed methods are helpful if the hardware of the web cam has no issues, and is working fine. If the above methods fail, administrators can check the hardware of the web cam by connecting it to any other computer, and then installing the appropriate driver for the device.

The device driver update methods discussed here require elevated privileges, which means that administrator account must be used to log on before initiating the web cam driver update process.

How to Fix the Issue with Webcam in Windows 8?

In order to fix the issue with webcam in Windows 8, step-by-step instructions given below must be followed:

    ■Log on to Windows 8 computer with the account that has the elevated privileges.

    ■Make sure that the computer is connected to an active Internet connection.

    ■Click Desktop tile from the Start screen to go to the desktop.

    ■Once on the desktop screen, hover mouse to the bottom right corner.

    ■From the displayed options, click Settings.

    ■On the Settings pane, click Control Panel.

    ■On the opened Control Panel window, click Hardware and Sound.

    ■On Hardware and Sound window, click Device Manager under Devices and Printers category from the right pane.

    ■On Device Manager window, expand Imaging device category.

    ■Once expanded, right-click the web cam driver that is to be updated.

    ■From displayed context menu, click Update Driver Software.

    ■On the displayed box, click Search automatically for updated driver software to update driver from the Internet.

    ■Wait till the selected driver gets updated, and on the next page, click Close.

    ■Close Device Manager window, when done.