My sister-in-law wanted us to start using Skype with her so that she could see our kids every once in a while on it.  While I do have a few crappy generic webcams that have default support in Vista x64, I knew their video quality would not be anywhere as good as the Logitech QuickCam Pro 3000 that has been collecting dust for years.

Unfortunately, I found that the driver for the QuickCam Pro 3000 is not digitally signed, therefore making it not work (or even detected) under Vista (x86 or x64).  Damn.  Since I refuse to let stuff like this stop me, I looked for a way around it…and found one.

I’m not going into extreme detail about how I did this, but all I really did was download the QuickCam Pro 4000 Vista x64 v10.5.1 package and begin the install.  When it got to the point where it wants you to plug in the camera, I edited all of the .inf and ini files, changing the hardware identifiers for the Pro 4000 to the Pro 3000.  I then deleted all of the .cat (catalog) files.  This is within the C:\Program Files (x86)\Logitech\QuickCamWebInstall\Drivers\x64\PRO64 directory for x64.  It’s not hard to figure out how to do it for x86, if you just stop and think about it for a second.  I then ended the installation there and manually installed the new driver from Device Manager.  Fired up the QuickCam application and voila!  I have video!  Everything works perfectly with no buggy surprises.

So, for those of you who think you have to go out and pay for a new webcam just because your perfectly good QuickCam Pro 3000 is not supported under Vista, think again!  Edited .ini and .inf files are posted below.  Just start the installation, extract the files to the directory listed above (overwrite!) and delete the .cat files in that directory.  Then do a manual install after cancelling the installation.  If you find I have not provided enough information on how to do this, do a Google Search. You’ll find a few sites that I came across after the fact that would have saved me a good hour or more.

Drivers