iSight not working

MY Macbook started suffering from RSS after I plugged in an external USB HD. I panicked at first, but then I resetted the PMU and things came back to normal. After that, I did the latest SMC upgrade which I had been postponing, tested the USB drive again and everything worked fine. BUT, somewhere along those happenings, my iSight stopped working. Since I rarely used it, whatever happened might have happened a long time ago for all I know and be completely unrelated to the problems I described.

Now, I bought my Macbook back in July, so I have about some 5 months of warranty left. I became heavily dependent on it for school and work, so I am not taking lightly the perspective of leaving it for who knows how much time to be fixed. Here in Brazil we have strict laws regarding how much time one can take to fix something under warranty - anything over a month and (theoretically) I am elegible to get my money back or a new machine.

So, I am not sure if I should take it right now - school has just started and I have a low workload right now - but I was thinking about leaving it in May, before the warranty expires - who knows, I might get a new Santa Rosa Macbook if they take too long to repair it (wishful thinking)! What do you guys think?

 

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93240

That is Apple's troubleshooting for iSight, so I would look at that. I believe even though it is integrated the iSight still uses USB, so it could be related to your previous issue. If all else fails, I would do an "Archive and Install" of OS X. It will preserve all your data and settings and just replace OS X. After that you can be pretty sure you have done everything possible and it will have to go in. HTH and good luck!

 

I've done that, it isn't even being recognized by System profiler so unfortunately it is most probably a hardware problem indeed. I might try the archive and install of OS X but I doubt it will help...

 

Were I you, I'd try to get it fixed asap, before the laptop's absence really hurts. I'm the sort of person who'd rather buy a new hard drive than send my laptop in for repair... but probably not a lot you can do with that. You may as well take advantage of your warranty.

But, firmware, general system controls and power controls... that does sound suspicious. Have you tried reapplying those updates? OS X can do wacky stuff. That time parallels borked my macbook, I could have sworn it was a hardware problem -- even the OS X install disk wouldn't boot. Turns out it was just some weird... thing... I never figured out what it was. Just nuked the partition table with a Linux boot disk and everything was back to normal.