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isight on Macbook turning on at startup

M

michaeljordan

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 12, 2008
9
0
Hi all,

My isight camera (as indicated by the green light) on the macbook turns on by itself during startup. Funnily enough, no applications are open that utilizes the camera (eg. skype, ichat, photobooth). The only way I can turn it off is by shutting the macbook off and turning it on again. Not even a restart will do, as the green light is still on after a restart. Is anyone facing similar issues? Any help will be much appreciated!
 
I had this happen the other day. When I was researching it I read some troubleshooting tips here. Luckily a restart corrected the issue for me, so I have no idea if a reset would work in your case. Another post I saw suggested turning off the computer and removing the battery for a few seconds.

Good luck!

Edit:

lancestraz said:
Try opening Photo Booth, does it say something about "The iSight is currently is use"?
Click to expand...

If their problem is anything like mine, their window will turn green in Photo Booth instead of showing camera output.
 
I have the EXACT same issue, and it's happened twice now. My iSight shows that its on, but no image appears when I check the prefs in iChat. A restart doesn't work, only a shutdown. The Apple discussions were useless. My Macbook is one of the Penryn models. michaeljordan, what Macbook are you having this issue with? Any input would be good. Thanks!
 
LurkingIowan said:
I have the EXACT same issue, and it's happened twice now. My iSight shows that its on, but no image appears when I check the prefs in iChat. A restart doesn't work, only a shutdown. The Apple discussions were useless. My Macbook is one of the Penryn models. michaeljordan, what Macbook are you having this issue with? Any input would be good. Thanks!
Click to expand...


Yep, my macbook is the Penryn models (2.1). When I opened photobooth, no image appears, since the camera is in use by some "phantom" application. It happened to me a few times. Only shutting down and turning it on will do. Looks like no one has an answer to it. IT SHOULDN'T HAPPEN! IT'S A NEW MAC!
 
I get this too. I wrote a thread about it a few minutes ago after I tried searching the net for some answers. I tried another search after making my thread and found this one :confused:.

Basically it's the same thing you guys have been having; new MacBook (Penryn 2.4, 6 weeks old), green light on iSight camera coming on during bootup and the only way to get rid of it is to shut down. Restart does nothing. It's only happened twice now though. The funny thing is, I never use the camera, neither for iChat (or any other IM software), or Photobooth. So I shouldn't have built up a cache of old iChat or Photobooth files that need clearing.

It's only happened twice though and so far only when I'm using the battery rather than the Magsafe power cord.
 
It has also happened to my wife's newly bought MacBook twice as well...

In our case, shutdown doesn't even do the trick, we had to do a SMC reset (taking out the battery and holding down Power button for 5 sec)

...what is wrong with it?
 
Apple seems to think the SMC just gets screwed up randomly. Doesn't sound very professional... I've heard of Windows apps nonsensically accessing hardware, but my CMOS settings never mutated.

That's one of the things I don't like about Apple: all this black box stuff is great as long as it "just works", but if it doesn't, a little transparency would be nice. Maybe I'm just not used to the innards of the OS yet (I've only had it for a month or two), but I miss being able to muck around in XP's guts whenever something went wrong. Note to self: must learn Linux commands...
 
Happened to me a couple times with my 1 month old macbook. First time a simple shutdown/restart fixed it. 2nd time (yesterday), I had to pull battery for a minute to clear it.
 
Happened to me a couple times. When I opened Photobooth though, it said no capture device detected, or something like that. A shutdown and reboot cleared it though. Hasnt happened since.
 
I posted this same thread not too long ago! The same thing has happened to me, twice, and I've had my Macbook just over a month. My boyfriend also had the same problem with his Macbook. Apparently it's something that "just happens," and for everyone, shutting down and rebooting seems to solve the problem.

In the thread I posted about this someone suggested clearing the permissions. As a newbie I don't exactly know what this does but I did it, and I haven't had the iSight turn on automatically on startup since, although this could just be a coincidence because it didn't happen very often. Just something to think about!
 
Ive been having the same problem. You would think apple would have a legit fix for this. Their help desk was no help and when i brought it into the store they told me to reinstall the disc it came with.
 
Any of you have this problem fixed yet? Mine still does it once and a while. Only pulling battery for a few minutes clears it. Everything else has been tried.
 
axeldtf said:
Ive been having the same problem. You would think apple would have a legit fix for this. Their help desk was no help and when i brought it into the store they told me to reinstall the disc it came with.
Click to expand...

This won't work. I did a fresh install about a week ago and the problem cropped up again yesterday. But like the others say, a shut down and restart clears the problem. As long as it's not a major hardware fault I'm not too fussed; I don't mind having to shut the MacBook down to clear it. I don't use the webcam much anyway. It's just annoying that it happens every now and then.

Note: The reason I did a fresh install was not related to this problem. I'd just gotten too much clutter from trying out Mac software and I wanted to have a nice fresh system once again.
 
Slothapotamus said:
This won't work. I did a fresh install about a week ago and the problem cropped up again yesterday. But like the others say, a shut down and restart clears the problem. As long as it's not a major hardware fault I'm not too fussed; I don't mind having to shut the MacBook down to clear it. I don't use the webcam much anyway. It's just annoying that it happens every now and then.

Note: The reason I did a fresh install was not related to this problem. I'd just gotten too much clutter from trying out Mac software and I wanted to have a nice fresh system once again.
Click to expand...
I encounter this problem every so often as well...usually quite early in the boot up process so I doubt it has anything to do with any of the installed applications. For me, it only seems to happen when I disconnect the power cable then power up, which is slightly odd, but I've seen this mentioned elsewhere too.
 
GavinR2 said:
I encounter this problem every so often as well...usually quite early in the boot up process so I doubt it has anything to do with any of the installed applications. For me, it only seems to happen when I disconnect the power cable then power up, which is slightly odd, but I've seen this mentioned elsewhere too.
Click to expand...

Yup, it only seems to happen when I don't have the power cable in (running off the battery basically). But it's very rare. Since I last wrote in this thread I think it has only happened twice.
 
may have found the fix

applecupcakes said:
I posted this same thread not too long ago! The same thing has happened to me, twice, and I've had my Macbook just over a month. My boyfriend also had the same problem with his Macbook. Apparently it's something that "just happens," and for everyone, shutting down and rebooting seems to solve the problem.

In the thread I posted about this someone suggested clearing the permissions. As a newbie I don't exactly know what this does but I did it, and I haven't had the iSight turn on automatically on startup since, although this could just be a coincidence because it didn't happen very often. Just something to think about!
Click to expand...

After reading this post it dawned on me that the iSight started coming on after loading Microsoft Office 2004 onto my honey's new MacBook. I've run into Microsoft issues in the past and figured we'd start with a software update for Office. With other Office past experiences, I've learned to do a "shutdown" and wait for 10 seconds and then "start" the machine instead of doing a "restart". Another thing is to run Disk Utilities (in the Utilities folder) and choose "Repair Disk Permissions" after doing ANY type of software updates to help eliminate errors. After several dry start-ups, the iSight issue seems to have been resolved.

Hope this might help others too.
 
BH2 said:
After reading this post it dawned on me that the iSight started coming on after loading Microsoft Office 2004 onto my honey's new MacBook. I've run into Microsoft issues in the past and figured we'd start with a software update for Office. With other Office past experiences, I've learned to do a "shutdown" and wait for 10 seconds and then "start" the machine instead of doing a "restart". Another thing is to run Disk Utilities (in the Utilities folder) and choose "Repair Disk Permissions" after doing ANY type of software updates to help eliminate errors. After several dry start-ups, the iSight issue seems to have been resolved.

Hope this might help others too.
Click to expand...

I don't think it has anything to do with MS Office. I don't have Office installed, and I'm sure there are others with the problem here who also don't have Office installed. The problem occurs randomly and rarely. Like you, I got it several times close together when I first noticed the problem. But now I get it maybe once or twice every 2 months, if that.
 
macbook camera light flashes on at startup

It's as simple as this. Green light comes on when camera is activated. My green light often flashes when I start up. Someone is taking my picture. I advise putting a piece of tape over the camera.
 
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