Webcam with Microphone for an older laptop. Any and all help greatly appreciated!

*miaomiao*

Good morning!

I'm looking to purchase a webcam for my mother's laptop as a birthday present because we live far away from each other. The webcam needs to have a microphone as well.

However, her laptop is a few years old and most of the webcams/mics I have seen online require higher specifications than her laptop has.

The laptop in question's specs are:

HP Compaq Presario V5000 laptop
AMD Turion 64 or AMD Sempron™ processor (sorry, I'm not sure which one exactly)
128MB RAM
ATI RADEON™ XPRESS 200M Integrated Graphics Processor
USB 2.0 ports

Any suggestions for a webcam/mic that would work with these specs would be really useful. If there is any more information that I can provide, let me know and I'll have a look!

Thanks so much!

John_Gray

I would say she'd have a job running almost anything in 128 MB of RAM! Skype will struggle heavily with that little RAM, so it doesn't really matter what sort of webcam she gets. Can it not be upgraded with more memory? Does it run XP Home - or something older like Windows 98 SE?

IF you get her a webcam, make sure that only the minimum software is installed with it, no video effects or other rubbish...

*miaomiao*

Thank, John Gray! That's what I was afraid of.

The computer is Windows XP Home. As for more RAM, I'll take a look but my mother struggles with the "I'm too old to actually bother doing much with my computer" problem (a pain!), so trying to get her to install some RAM would be difficult. : (

macman

Get along to crucial.com and find her a RAM upgrade first.
You should be running an absolute minimum of 512Mb RAM (assuming XP), but preferably 1GB.
Almost all modern webcams have a mike built in.
If necessary why not get it installed for her as an additional present? -It's a 10 min job at her local independent computer shop-they might charge £10-15.
Trying to run XP on 128MB of RAM is like wading through treacle, so it'll make her much more likely to use the laptop.

Richie-from-the-Boro

The V5000 lappie had two slots available [ PC3200]
£70 will give 2x1GB of memory and £40 will give you 2x512 of memory as an upgrade
John Gray's advice is good, but worth mentioning the onboard XPRESS 200M steals some of the already limited RAM
__

So the current 256 could easily go to 2x512 or 2x1GB
All of the Microsoft Lifecam products have drivers available 32 & 64bit from MS for WinXP onward

JasX

Lucky something that old actually has USB slots........

Richie-from-the-Boro

JasX wrote: »

Lucky something that old actually has USB slots........

Aye and they were on v2, lucky eh !