Sony VAIO VGN-CR123E Webcam Missing

My Dad decided he wants to try out Skype, so I decided to set it up for him. The webcam function wouldn't work and after repeatedly reinstalling the webcam driver from the Sony website, I realized that it just wasn't showing up in the Device Manager. Repeated installations and hardware scans are just not picking it up. Let me clarify that this is the first time he's ever tried to use the webcam on the computer.

Is this likely an indication of a hardware problem?

This is the driver I've repeatedly tried installing:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VGNCR123E&upd_id=2828&os_id=28

The strange part is that although the driver installation goes very quickly, no errors show up and it states at the end of the installation that it installed sucessfully and lists the following as the driver name:

Windows Driver Package - Ricoh R5U870 (UVC) (04/02/2007 6.1005.209.0)

Despite this, it's not showing up at all in the Device Manager or anywhere. It's basically as if the camera is non-existent physically.

If it is a hardware problem, then I'm just going to buy him an external webcam. The laptop is out of warranty.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

 

is there a hotkey (function key) to enable it? Many notebooks have a control that cuts usb to the cam when you hit fn-something.

 

Not that I can see, no.

 

This issue sounds like hardware related.
Was the web cam working before? When did it stop working?
A clean install of the OS will be worth trying.

 

This is the first time I tried the web cam for him and he never tried it before, so I am assuming it never worked in the first place.

I've been thinking about doing a clean install, but I have a feeling that won't help.