My laptop suddenly disabled my camera and now I don't know how to reinstall it.

[Nicole124]

I have an HP ENVY x360  laptop that I bought in 2020 so my warranty is expired. If there's anyway this problem can be fixed without taking it for repairs, that would be great. The problem that I'm experiencing has to do with my camera. I usually leave my laptop on over night because I fall asleep listening to youtube. But last night, I woke up to my dog walking on my keyboard and pressing a bunch of buttons that ended up in a screen popping up and a whole bunch of information on it and when she'd press buttons it would make really loud beeping sounds. But instead of reading what it said, I just sleepily tried to close it as quick as possible because I had an exam this morning. All I can remember reading was a prompt saying "Exit without saving changes?" And I clicked yes and just closed it to back to sleep, but before that, I noticed that my camera key was set as off, so I turned it on and closed my laptop. After I get back from class today, I open my laptop to see that there's a grey camera icon stuck on my screen. 

I'm even typing this with it still on my screen It's in front of all of my applications. So I did some troubleshooting and got an error that said that there wasn't a camera detected, or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it said because I've seen so many errors saying exactly the same thing. And so I was sent to Microsoft support, the agent told me to look into device manager for the camera tab, and there wasn't one there, I later found out that if I clicked show hidden devices, it would have showed up but I'll get into that later. So after I told the agent that the camera tab wasn't there, she recommended me to go to HP support, which I did. From there, I was told to do a System Restore, which I did back to 07/26/22. But even after that, the camera still didn't work, even though I didn't have this problem two days ago. That lead me to google to search for results, which is when I saw that my laptop could see the camera but for some reason it was disabled. And then when going back to the Device manager, I saw the camera tab when showing hidden devices, as I said before. This time I clicked on it, I looked into the properties and everything and it said that the camera wasn't activated or something like that. I didn't think to take screenshots of these things because I didn't think it would get this bad. But after some more googling, I'd seen many people recommending to uninstall the camera driver and restart my laptop and Windows would try to reinstall the driver since the camera is built into  the computer. But after uninstalling it, it never seemed to reinstall and now I don't know how to reinstall it manually. Because I assumed that fixing the camera would get this icon off of my screen. I've tried going to the HP Driver and Software Download page and the camera driver doesn't pop up. 

Please help me reinstall my camera driver so I can get this icon off of my screen.

[ub6424]

Hello @Nicole124 

Follow these clear instructions. Most problems with a camera are shown and explained how to solve them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMSrYn3MJRY&ab_channel=WindowsChimp

Please report your results