We couldn't find a camera compatible with Windows Hello Face

Anonymous
2023-03-15T10:02:25+00:00

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T15g Gen 1 running Windows 10 Pro 22H2 64-bit. I am having trouble trying to setup Windows Hello Face.

The initial problem was that the setup proceeded all the way to the phase where it showed my face and was supposed to recognize it, but then nothing happened and the only option available was to cancel the setup. In order to solve that issue I did according to the instructions here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hello/facial-recognition-not-working-for-windows-10/0253a932-4313-4536-858d-abebb50bfad9 i.e. removed the camera drivers ("Integrated Camera" and "Integrated IR Camera") and one driver with "Hello" in its name (can't recall the exact name anymore) from Device Manager. The camera drivers appeared back automatically but the Hello driver does not even if I scan for hardware changes.

Now after doing that the Windows Hello Setup does not even start but shows the error message "We couldn't find a camera compatible with Windows Hello Face" (see the screenshot). I contacted Lenovo support and they say the camera is compatible (after all, it showed the video in the setup before I removed the drivers), also the camera cannot be physically broken because no other application has any problems using it. Lenovo's solution would have been to reimage the whole computer, which I obviously cannot do because I have all my vital work related stuff installed in it.

So I'm quite stuck now and afraid to try things arbitrarily as my earlier attempt to do so only made the situation worse. My own guess is this has something to do with the drivers but I don't know where to get drivers that are definitely compatible with my device and will make this work. Help from anyone who understands how this thing works will be highly appreciated. Thank you.

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Windows Hello, lock screen and sign-in

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  1. Anonymous
    2023-03-19T17:18:25+00:00

    Here's a few screenshots of the firmware's property pages:

    Note that I have restarted the laptop several times since this appeared flagged (referring to what the screenshot in the middle claims).

    Your link opened a site that had 8 versions of the driver. Not sure if they differed in any way as their sizes were said to be identical, anyway I picked the bottommost one. In extracting the package I had to deviate from your instructions a little as the cab file contained a folder structure (there was a subfolder named x64 that contained files with same names as the ones in the root folder) so I used 7zip in extracting it to retain the folder structure and avoid file name clashes. After the installation and restart, the device's property pages in Device Manager looked like this:

    but the Windows Hello Face setup was still unavailable. I did the driver installation under the admin account.

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  2. Virginia M 42,075 Reputation points Independent Advisor
    2023-03-19T17:42:01+00:00

    Do you have fast startup enabled? If yes then this can interfere with installing firmware.

    https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/turn-off-fast-startup/5362cd29-86ca-4b39-be60-718446f9d5f8

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  3. Anonymous
    2023-03-19T19:49:38+00:00

    Creating a System Image Restore Point is a process that takes several hours and gigabits of hard drive space, while creating a (regular) restore point, which only saves the drivers and a few other system settings, takes just a few minutes, so I wouldn't be so sure Windows will create an extra System Image Restore Point before restoring another one. At least I wouldn't take the risk even if I saw Microsoft documentation say so (I did not).

    I'm not sure what you refer to by Lenovo's fix resulting in the problem and obviously the solution is more important than who to blame, but just to recap how things went (all this is already said in my original post): First Microsoft's operating system refused to recognize my face from the video the camera was nicely giving to it, and when I did according to instructions given in Microsoft forum, the entire Microsoft feature stopped even starting while every other application continued and still continues to co-operate with the camera just nicely. Only then I contacted Lenovo and since their "fix" was unacceptable, I did not do it but came to this forum.

    We are talking a lot about drivers and other stuff that in my mind is totally irrelevant in this problem, because every other application still continues to interact with the camera perfectly even though we have done our best to break also that by installing several random and more or less suspicious driver versions. It's the Windows Hello Face that has the problem.

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  4. Anonymous
    2023-03-19T19:54:09+00:00

    That piece of advice was given in a situation where the setup launched but just did not recognize the face, wasn't it? That was also my original problem and I remember I tried that advice then (it did not work) after which I tried the other instruction which brought these additional problems.

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  5. Anonymous
    2023-03-19T19:56:16+00:00

    I don't have fast startup enabled and cannot enable it because it would cause several other issues.

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