Our work purchased approximately 700 Asus eee 1001HA netbooks about 5 years ago and up until a few months ago, we had no use or purpose for the webcams. We changed our processes to make better use of the webcams, and when we went to deploy the updated software, we found that the webcams wouldn't work on approximately 20% of them.
We tried a variety of different things to get these webcams working, from disabling them in the BIOS, to formatting and factory resetting the machines, without any luck. I even tried booting into a Ubuntu disk to see if I could detect anything (I couldn't).
It seemed the only solution we had was to physically remove the web cam hardware, swap it over with a working one and boot the machine, then when it had recognised it, swap it back for the old camera. This of course is far too time intensive as each netbook would take about 10 minutes to swap over.
We aren't planning on keeping these devices around for too much longer, but I don't like to leave a problem unsolved, and am convinced there has to be another way.
I revisited it the other day and found that by disabling the webcam in the BIOS and re-enabling it, it started to work again. Excitedly, I tried this in a second netbook and was unable to replicate it. After trying 2 or 3 more, I realised that I was just lucky.
The other thing I did notice, although it doesn't seem to be a problem today, is that the quality of the web cam image was terrible. It looked to be 160x120 instead of 640x480. However, in booting up all of the netbooks today, I couldn't find one with this problem.
TL;DR: I have about 200 netbooks where the webcam doesn't work. The only reliable to fix these is by physically removing the camera, swapping it with a working one and swapping it back. Does anyone have any other suggestions?
