webcam troubles

[turtlesrock]

I recently purchased a Dell Inspiron 15R 5520 laptop, it has windows 8 and the whole bit. I've been using it for a while now and everything's been shiny, until 2 days ago. I'd logged on to gmail and saw that I wasn't eligible for voice and video chat anymore, so I reinstalled the plugin to see if that would work. It didn't, so I decided to check the webcam itself. I went to the camera app and it said I didn't have a webcam attached. I consulted the google machine, and couldn't find any solutions. However, I did learn about the device manager, and how to check up on the webcam itself. The error code I got was this:
Currently, this hardware device is not connected to the computer. (Code 45)
To fix this problem, reconnect this hardware device to the computer.
It's a built-in webcam, not sure how much more connected it could get. I'm not exactly good with computers so any help would be very, very appreciated.

[Rico]

First question - did the webcam ever work in any application?

[turtlesrock]

Yes, I've used on skype, the camera app, and cameroid.com on multiple occasions. It worked just fine, one day I accessed the boot menu on accident, I got out of there as soon as I could for fear of messing something up, could that have done it?

[Rico]

If the webcam did work that's a good sign.  A couple things to try.  The most basic would be to check with Dell and/or do a search for the model of the computer you have and list webcam driver or webcam not found in your search.  Also, did the machine come with some type of driver or restore disc?  It's most likely a driver issue.  I'm not up on Win 8 enough to know how their boot menu is setup.  But try some of these steps.

[turtlesrock]

Yup, probably a driver issue. I tried restarting the computer to install other updates (classic ol' turn it off turn it on again) and all of a sudden, the webcam's working again.  :) Thank you for the help.