How to turn on and off my laptop camera

It is not enough to put a sticker on the webcam. So, we teach you how to activate and deactivate the laptop camera in a simple way.

We know that for many privacy is very important, especially in the use of your laptop. After the scandal that uncovered an espionage of laptop users through their webcams, we have decided to give you some guidelines to disable this hardware. As you will see, it has no mystery and is very easy to do.

Index of contents

Disable (or enable) the laptop camera

Next, we are going to tell you how to deactivate the camera of the laptop in a very simple way, you just have to follow the following steps. Ready?

• We open the Start Menu and write " control panel ".

• As always, check that the view is by small icons and not by categories

• Go to the option " Device Manager ".

• Here you go to " imaging devices " or, as it comes to me on my desktop, " cameras ".

• Right-click on the camera or webcam and click " Disable device ". In this sense, it would already be deactivated. If you want to reactivate it, you just have to right-click and select " Enable device ".

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Disable camera or webcam from BIOS

There is the possibility to go further and disable it from our BIOS. To do this, we will have to start our laptop and when the manufacturer's logo appears, press (usually) F9 or Delete. I don't get which key to press, so I press several at the same time, so you never fail!

Once we are inside, navigate between the menus until you see something related to I / O ports or something similar. In my case, the following came out:

"CMOS Camera" or "Internal Camera" is the same. In my case, unlock means it is activated; lock would be the alternative to disabling the camera. In some cases you can disable the microphone as well.

Deactivate microphone

With our privacy it is not played, not only it is enough to deactivate the camera of the laptop. Therefore, we are going to go a little further and we are also going to deactivate the microphone of the device. The process is the same, so don't close the device manager yet. This is not mandatory, it is simply mandatory.

• You just have to look for the internal microphone or " Internal Microphone ". So, go to " Audio inputs and outputs ".

• We right click again and disable the device, just like before. We can also activate it again, as with the camera.

With this, the tutorial would have come to an end. So we hope it has helped you. If you have any questions, comment below so we can answer you.

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Do you know any other advice? Did you know this method? Were you able to disable your cameras?