A word about the pre-existing condition of my TR3A. The original HDD has died along with its recovery partition. I’ve called sony support hoping to buy recovery cds, they told me THEY ARE NO LONGER MANUFACTURED!!!!! (ai, grrrrr this is ridiculous!!!)
So I’m stuck with a clean installation of XP-home and whatever drivers/software I can find online.

The original CCD has died a long time ago too. But now I’ve got a brand new part from Sony direct parts website, and when I plug the whole thing in -
it does not show up in the device manager, and network smart capture shows a “no input” message.
Same exact thing happens when I try to switch to the old part. The computer simply doen’t recognize that it’s there and it’s plugged in.

The microphone (which seems to be located on the same part, right?) is working.

So, then I downloaded some drivers off of support.vaio.co.uk. The filenames of the drivers that seem to represent the camera are:
sonyvcc.sys
snyluvcc.sys
sonyvcc.cat
sonyvcc.inf
sonyvcc.pnf
infcache.1

I’ve searched my system folders for these files and they are not there.
Where/how do I install these?

Any other advice? I’m completely lost…

As far as I know the mic is bottom right of unit near cursor keys.

Are you sure the cameras connector ribbon is the correct way around and in far enough it goes in a fair way and it doesn’t just push in you have to open a tiny hinge clip. Also there is a switch board in the camera housing (it flips the image when you turn the camera). I found if this is not fixed in place with a screw it wont work because it requires chassis earth.

check all wires and ribbing condition and If you still get no joy I have spares of all those pieces, and a camera that white screens which would be ok to test with (as it appears in the device manager ok)

Restore discs are available on ebay quite often, make sure you get one for your exact model. I could send you one but I’m uk based and there is model differences, we have Tr1mp Tr2mp & tr5mp here, so i doubt it would work

I have just bought a faulty TR3a I’ll find out if it is coming with the restore CD’s

8)