Welcome to Apple Discussions, Biggypsyring
Your problem may be hardware related, but until you get better suggestions from iNtel Mac users, here are some common solutions that help most avoid a visit to their Apple Service Technician.
None of the suggestions is complicated, but the only way to find which one will work for you is to try them one-by-one until you find the one that fixes your Mac. Some of these suggestions duplicate those that Rick suggested above. It is up to you whether you want to try them more than once.
(0) Disconnect any unnecessary peripherals while you do your testing to rule out possible conflicts.
(1) Restart your Mac. Sometimes that is all that is required.
(2) If you use VMware Fusion to run Windows on your Mac, consider
disconnecting iSight from your Virtual Machine as recommended by user "The.VCI" in this post.
(3) If you use an HP printer/scanner with your Mac, consider
the "daemon" suggestions from user "parkersal" in this post.
(4) Check for any running applications,
Login Items, or widgets that can use your iSight. (It is easy to forget widgets like Mirror in your Dashboard.) As explained in Apple's
iSight "Your camera is in use by another application" message, iSight can be used by one application at a time.
(5) Try every suggestion re: Built-in iSight in
How to Troubleshoot iSight. Be sure to include the checks for whether the problem is "application-specific" and "user-specific".
Click here if you need help creating a new user account to check whether your problem is "user-specific" during Troubleshooting.
(6) If resetting or the other troubleshooting suggestions do correct your problem, try the following:
- Backup your Home Folder, or at very least, your important files.
- Repair permissions. (
Click here if you need help.)
- Then download and apply the
Mac OS X 10.4.10 Combo Update v1.1 (iNtel).
- Finish with another Permissions Repair, and then check your iSight again.
Users have reported fixes to a variety of audio, video, connectivity, and software conflicts and unreliability issues after properly applying Combo Updates.
(7) A few iNtel Mac laptop users have also reported success after unplugging their Macs and leaving the battery out for half-an-hour to overnight.
(8) If none of these suggestions help, I suggest that you take your iMac to your Apple-Authorized Service Provider for a professional check.
EZ
Jim
PowerBook 1.67 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.10) G5 DP 1.8 External iSight
