The Daily Parker

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Logitech Orbit MP doesn't work at IDT (corrected)

Correction, 25 January 2006 12:00 CST/18:00 UTC: The problem described below turned out to be a bad individual camera. Logitech was great, replacing the bad camera with a new one, no questions asked. The new camera has been running without interruption for several weeks now.

The original blog entry follows:

I can't believe how much time is being sucked away from me by this broken Webcam problem. I am now on hold with Logitech, and though my call is very important to them, they are experiencing higher-than-normal call volumes, so they'll take my call in the order it was received.

I got a Logitech Orbit MP that should have been a tremendous improvement over the Intel Cam III I've been using for two years. The poor Intel camera is unstable, half-burned-out, slow, and basically showing its age. The new Logitech camera should be none of these things, and should have the added benefit of being able to tilt and pan so that it's never looking directly at the sun, as my poor Intel camera has on occasion done.

The Logitech camera worked beautifully on my laptop. Then it worked really well right away when I connected it to the old server. Then I logged into the server remotely, and the image froze. Then I couldn't get the server to recognize the camera. After six reboots, I thought the problem was the Belkin USB extension cord. So I moved the camera to another computer, closer to the window, for the time being.

Now the camera doesn't work at all. Nothing I can do will get the computer to recognize it. In fact, it's acting dead. Thus my call to Tech Support, which is a prerequisite to sending it back for replacement.

Let's count the damage so far: Three hours of time that I should have spent installing a server for a client (they're out of the office until Tuesday so there's at least no rush there), a parking ticket (my fault, I know), and probably an aneurism.

Final update before heading to client, 18:56 UTC: After 21 minutes of holding and a 6-minute conversation, Logitech is replacing the camera. So look in about two weeks for the second attempt.

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