Aurora R12, webcams turn on and off?

Question

I have an Alienware Aurora R12 and it works great. But randomly during work meetings my webcam just fails and the Google Meet (via Chrome) shows me as muted and with camera off out of nowhere. It happens with two different webcams (one brand new). Both work fine in my laptop without a similar issue. There’s absolutely no pattern here? Sometimes I can take a two hour meeting without issue and sometimes it happens every 5 seconds. Sometimes I can turn the audio and/or video back on, but sometimes it’s just done and it won’t let me toggle them back on at all. I suspect the USB drives (although it happens when the webcam is plugged into any of them) or some type of power saving issue affecting the USB drives, and I had seemingly fixed this issue a few months ago until this week by disabling the power management mode on my USB ports, but as of this week it just magically started happening again (and those settings are still disabled…). Right now I have both webcams plugged in at the same time and I’m sitting at the ready to join screen of Google Meets where it shows you through your webcam, and after a few minutes one or the other will just flip to black and say camera is off or camera failed. I’m not touching my PC in any way, I'm just sitting here waiting for them to randomly flip to off for no reason. They don’t even do it at the same time, just one webcam or the other gets bored of looking at me eventually or something and flips to off / muted while the other one stays showing me for a couple more minutes until it does it too. Anybody have any ideas?

DELL-Chris M · Answer

Click the hyperlinked DELL-Cares username. On the right, click, "Send this user a private message". Share the private Aurora R12 Service Tag with them.

I would start troubleshooting by testing only one USB-A webcam in all 13 USB-A ports.

I would also make sure that if I had any wireless device transmitter plugged into a USB-A port, that it was not in the same bank as the USB-A webcam.

js_seven777 · Answer

Hi Chris,

I appreciate your help. One clarification, the issue does not only occur with two webcams attached. During work meetings I only have one webcam and one Microsoft USB stick which controls my wireless keyboard and mouse.

I have tried today every USB-A port with one webcam connected, and with the Microsoft USB stick in a different USB bank from the webcam. The issue occurred for all tested ports. There is no combination of ports I can find that does not produce this issue.

I have noticed that it tends to occur in bunches. So like there will be an hour or two where it doesn't happen, but once it happens it just keeps happening for thirty to forty minutes every couple minutes or every few seconds even when I unplug and replug into a new port, then later in the day I can go for awhile without it happening again for a bit.

Thanks again for your help. Any other suggestions?

DELL-Chris M · Answer

Do you still have Dell Driver Update Utility and Dell SupportAssist installed? If yes, open the Task Manager and try to end task on every listing for those. Then log into a meeting to see if the issue still happens.

js_seven777 · Answer

Hi Chris,

So I went through SupportAssist and updated all my drivers that showed as needing updates from the Dell website (there were 4 or 5), then I uninstalled it completely. I didn't see the Dell Drive Update Utility anywhere.

I did 4-5 hours of meetings without the issue re-occuring today. That doesn't mean it's fixed 100% because it happened all the time a few months ago and then stopped for a few months before restarting this week.

If removing SupportAssist did in fact fix the issue, does that point to any underlying causes? Is an Alienware Aurora R12 with basically every upgrade offered at checkout really incapable of running a webcam + SupportAssist at the same time? Or does this point to some sort of underlying resource issue and/or potential hardware problem that I should be looking more into?

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