Aspire 5101a wlmi, a couple of questions

I have a couple of questions, the first one is about the orbicam. When I got my laptop it had Vista premium installed.. But I didn't like it, and the orbicam stopped working after I tried to install new drivers for it, so I did a reformat and installed XP instead. Then I installed the orbicam drivers (bison) and the install program said I should see a message.. "the hardware is installed and ready to use"... Well, I never got that message, and the computer said it needed to restart after the installation, well.. I restarted. When it had booted back up I clicked the orbicam icon.. but nothing happened. Then I went to the "device manager" and I saw a "usb 2.0 camera" with an exclamation mark in front. Then I figured I'd just right click and choose update drivers... so I did, but I have no idea what drivers were installed. Now it works.. but the picture quality is alot worse than in Vista, and the orbicam program still doesn't work.. To get the camera running I need to go to "my computer" and click the "usb2.0 camera" icon in the bottom.. I think it might be because of when I chose "update drivers" it didn't install the correct drivers? How can I get the original orbicam drivers installed?
Oh, another thing... when I had a videochat on msn... and tried to open the camera through "my computer" at the same time to get a picture that I had stored there... I got a bluescreen and I needed to restart.. afterwards the system wouldn't detect a camera anymore.. not even after re-installing the drivers... so I had to do a reformat. What is up with that?

Ok, now this is turning out to be a really long post.. bare with me. just a couple of questions more.

When I have had the system turned on for a little while.. I can hear a faint high pitch squeeling noise coming from the machine.. is this normal? it's not really that loud. But I was wondering what could be causing it.

Last question. What's on that hidden partition?? Is it the Vista installation? If that's the case, how do I install Vista again? I was thinking that I might want to do that in the future, when all the problems have been fixed.

Thanks for reading my long boring post.. I hope someone can answer all my questions. This is the first laptop I own, so I'm quite new on the field.

 

Most likely you need to find better/newer driver for you integrated camera.

The high pitch noise is probably coming from your cpu. It is an known issue.
Solution to it

The hidden partition contain system recovery information/disk. There should of been an option in the start menu to burn the partition to a disk but since you reformatted i dont know if you still have that option.

 

Ok, thanks.. Another question.. Is there any software for the cam that I can use to record video and do more advanced stuff?

 

The high pitched sound is still there it has something to do with the screen.. when I lower the brightness it goes away.

 

Ok, three posts in a row ... well I just unplugged the powersupply.. and the squeeling noise seems to be gone.