I've only had my HP Envy laptop for a little over a year. I got it for school, and one of the big things I was happy about was the built-in webcam (that my previous laptop did not have) which meant I could skype with my parents several thousand miles away.
However, said webcam has stopped working. I had a few bits of trouble with it in the past doing this same thing, but each time it has managed to fix itself the enxt time I tried to use it. I've tried youcam as well, to see if it was an issue with skype, but sure enough that did not work either.
Whenever i try to use it, it tells me the webcam is being used by another application. I even went into settigns and disabled the webcam to everything except what I wanted it for, nothing. I closed all other programs that even might have been interfereing. Nothing.
A few weeks ago, it was working but it was doing weird things. The colors kept getting distorted in multiple different ways. Sometimes it would look like I was in a really brightly lit room. Other times it would look like I had very little light at all. The colors kept changing as well, where sometimes everything would look very orange, another time very purple, etc. And sometimes it would "flash" between the distortions, but sometimes it would pick a distortion and stay on that one for 10-20 mins. at first we thoguht it might just be the lighting, since it was only my end doing it, but after playing with all the lights in my room to see if they had any effect, we determined that it was not the cause. After that time, it has not worked at all.
I have gone into the device manager, and i have HP Truevision HD listed under my imaging devices. It is the only one there, and it says everything is up to date and it is working properly. I've honestly been having these problems since I got my computer, but each time it has been a one time deal and was working again the next day. This is not the case this time.
Any help is appreciated! This is the only way i get to "see" my parents and vice versa, and with the holidays coming up it would be nice to have this working...