I had a visit recently with a friend who told me he was having an issue with his laptop camera not working in Zoom.
He could join his book club meetings, but he couldn’t show his face (which he joked might not be such a bad thing).
To troubleshoot, we set up a quick Zoom meeting between his laptop and my iPhone.
Sure enough, he could see my face, but I couldn’t see his.
His computer was a Windows 10 laptop.
I started poking around in the Zoom app. In the meeting window, there is a small icon of a camera that you click to turn the camera on or off. When I clicked to turn the camera on, Zoom complained that there was no camera available.
My next stop was to look in the Windows Device Manager to see whether a camera was listed among the connected devices, and sure enough, there was a camera listed.
I tried updating the camera’s driver, but that didn’t help.
Then I deleted the camera from the Device Manager and asked the computer to scan for hardware changes. The rescan found the camera and added the driver.
When the camera driver was reloaded, I noticed a popup window in the lower right corner of the screen, warning that my friend’s Norton Antivirus software was keeping Zoom from using the camera.
Bingo. We found our culprit.
I clicked on a “details” link in the Norton popup message, and I was shown a window listing the last few instances of the computer trying to use the camera. Norton blocked each one.
There was a place in the window where you could allow Zoom to use the camera. We did that, and my friend was happy.
We don’t use any of the third-party antivirus suites like McAfee or Norton on any of our PCs at the university where I work.
I tend to stay away from any kind of “gatekeeper” software that isn’t built into the Windows operating system. It tries its best to protect you from outside problems, but it can cause other issues that can be hard to track down.
Software like Norton Antivirus used to be the way to go, but I don’t use any of those since Microsoft got serious about improving Windows Defender.
He said he might consider doing the same with his PC.
My friend’s experience is a perfect example of how security suite products can cause problems by limiting peripherals’ functionality. If it happens to you, paying attention to those popups could help.
A popup window telling us that the camera was blocked made my troubleshooting a breeze.
