Webcams

[crokett]

A while back I posted about webcams. I ended up with two older Intel webcams, and therein lies a saga.

We got my in-laws a fancy new webcam along with their laptop but performance on it was terrible. I wasn't sure if it was the USB1.1, the P3 laptop or the webcam itself. When they were here on a visit I tried adding USB 2.0 to their laptop but had issues with two different PC cards. Next I tried their webcam on my laptop, performance was terrible. I have a dual-core Intel w/full GIG of RAM so it wasn't the laptop. I had another webcam laying around, that didn't work much better. The only one that worked ok was the Intel my wife had with the native Windows drivers and no crappy software to install. So we took a flyer on a 5.00 camera from eBay.

Tonight we had our first webconference and my 3yr old was absolutely delighted that she could see Grandma and Grandpa. So we have 2 older webcams and Netmeeting. Simple and cheap, but it works.

[leehljp]

Congratulations for enabling visual communications between grandparents and grandkids! Nothing like it! LOML enjoyed seeing our grandkids in TX and AR for Mother's day! It was Grandma's day for her.

We started about 2 years ago and it has actually cut our international phone bill by more than 2/3s. Initially, it was a bugger getting the camera to work decently for one of the computers on hand, which had 1.1 USB built in. That was the biggest problem, so we bought a 2.0 USB PC/ card to hook the camera through and then it worked fine from then on. On three add on cameras (not built in) our girls used Logitech cams.