toucam/spc900 vista woes

[Texy]

Hi,

I,ve had a toucam proII in my odd's n sods box for a number of years, got a MOGG adapter, but lost interest in astronomy before I used it. Now that I,m gaining interest in astronomy again, I thought I take another look. I,m planning on doing a SC1.5 mod to it, but first I thought I,d change the firmware to make it a SPC900. No problem there - my XP main computer took care of it, and everything is dandy and is recognised and working fully on that PC.

Now I want to use it on my laptop, which of course runs vista.

How I,m gonna control the LX side of life with no serial port or parallel port on this laptop is for another day, but for now I can't even get the drivers working. I think I started out incorrectly by loading possibly the xp drivers by mistake. Once I noticed that, I tried to load the correct drivers from the philips website. Unfortunately, part way through the install, the program crashes with an error, no matter how many tries I take. This is with enabling administrator mode, BTW. At the moment, when I connect the camera, vista says asks me to search for the drivers, but it says it still doesn't recognise the camera, and the red LED is on permanently. The thing is that I know the camera works fine on my xp pc, and I also know that the camera was working fine on my laptop before I converted it to SPC900. Perhaps I should just convert it back to a toucam, but I understand that there is a better codec option to use when recording avi's, if it is a spc900.

On another note, I got hold of a couple od 4066's from maplins yesterday, and I also picked up one of the flight cases on offer for £15 - so cheers for the heads from whoever posted that tip here;)

Texy

[Merlin66]

Vista Tips

This should help you install the Philips webcams to Vista.

Ken

[Texy]

Thanks - I read those pages yesterday. Strictly speaking they do not cover my particular situation. They explain how to install the toucam drivers on vista. My toucam has been converted to a SPC900, therefore the drivers will not see my webcam unless a back convert it. Also, not sure if this is important, my toucam is a 840k.

Unless I,m missing something...........

Texy

[Merlin66]

If the firmware update makes it "look" like a SPC900, can't you then just use the Philip's installation software for vista?? The disk I have says it's for XP and Vista?

( I'm still using XP so can't help much)

[TopHouse]

You may have confused the installation and windows is having trouble with it now, try uninstalling everything philps first of all and do a restart. Next, if you have a registry cleaner it 'should' remove any remnants. If not, take a look at ccleaner, it's a good, safe, free cleaning software highly regarded and recognised.

Next, now i'm unfamilar with vista for this but there should be something similar, open device manager. From the menu at the top select "show hidden devices" and look through the lists for any refernce to your webcam and right click/uninstall. Reboot again and then try installing the software, DO NOT plug the camera in before you have installed the software.

[Texy]

I have used the philips vista installer, and I have uninstalled the "unknown device" via device manager. I have not played around with the registry yet, however. I,ll have another go tonight, cheers.

Texy