Sufering wid same problem

For some unknown reason the bios seems to just turn off the camera. This has happened on the linux versions and may happen on the XP versions too.

Solution: (by memory as I can't check this and type this too)
1 Reboot your machine and hit the F2 key (repeatedly, every second or so) very early oin the boot sequence to bring up the bios window.
2 select the hardware section and check that the camera is enabled. If not enable it and exit with F10 which will save the settings.

Hope this works.

Check if your laptop has inbuilt recovery partition.
Also if you have recovery discs you can reinstall the cam application since most of the inbuilt softwares that come with your notebook will present in the Recovery discs or Recovery partition.