On December last year I found out about Windows Live Messenger 2009 and mistakenly thought it was official final version but it was actually a public beta. Anyway I installed it on my laptop and is using it until today. So far it has been perfect and never got any problems with it. While I was back in my home town for two weeks last month, I wanted to see my wife from her webcam in her laptop but the “Show my webcam” option has been grayed out. I used TeamViewer to remotely control the computer and ran Audio and video setup, the webcam test was fine… Weirdly the “Start a video call” worked as well.
As you all know, the Internet connection in my hometown is really slow and the video call between me and my wife is terribly slow and I could only see her 1 frame in . I didn’t want to use video call because it requires more bandwidth to transfer both audio and video compared to Show My Webcam which only streams the video. I wasn’t able to find a solution at that time but today I’ve found a workaround to enable Show My Webcam on Windows Live Messenger 2009.
Only my new Acer laptop running Windows Vista with Windows Live Messenger 2009 has the show my webcam missing problem but it was fine on my old laptop that’s running Windows XP with Windows Live Messenger 2009. First thing I did was to uninstall WLM 2009 and then do a reinstallation but no go. Then I thought that the problem could be caused by the Acer Crystal Eye Webcam that is installed by default, so I uninstalled it but still couldn’t use show my webcam option. I also read that antivirus could cause such problems. I terminated Kaspersky Antivirus 2009, all connections has been reset and I had to reconnect the Windows Live Messenger 2009. Suddenly the Show my webcam option is AVAILABLE! I then tried to show my webcam and it worked!
OK I hit the jackpot and thought it was Kaspersky but I was wrong. I rebooted the computer, terminated Kaspersky, ran Windows Live Messenger 2009, connected but this time the show my webcam option is again unavailable. I had to uninstall Kaspersky to confirm that it is not the cause of the problem but still the same. So it’s not Kaspersky…
After further testing, I found out that the show my webcam will be available after syncing the Windows Live Messenger 2009 connection. What you need to do is to run Windows Live Messenger 2009 and sign in as usual. Once you’re signed in, click the small button on the top right, select File > Sign Out.
When you’ve successfully signed out, sign in again. Weirdly that will enable the show my webcam option.
There’s no such problem on my old laptop which I manually installed Windows XP and Vista with external webcam. I am not sure what is the cause of this problem but I believe it should have something to do with either some of the pre-installed software/driver by Acer or the build-in webcam on my new laptop. Well Windows Live Messenger 2009 is still in public beta, so it is expected to have some bugs. With this workaround, I don’t need to revert back to the old Messenger 8.5 and can continue using the beautiful Windows Live Messenger 2009 😉