Fix internal MacBook camera if it stops working

I purchased a new MacBook recently. A few days after its purchase, the internal camera stopped working. Launching iChat or PhotoBooth activated the camera displaying the green light. The Apple System Profiler also showed that the camera was installed under the USB section. Everything looked good, except that the picture was black.

I read through the forums everywhere, and none of the obvious solutions worked. Zapping the PRAM didn't help. Restarting into Single User mode and then restarting again didn't help. But one trick did get my internal MacBook camera working again:

Solution to fix your black screen camera on your MacBook:

1) Shut down your Mac.
2) Remove the battery and plug power sources.
3) Hold the on/off Power switch button on your Mac for 5 seconds.
4) Reconnect the battery and turn your Mac back on. That should re-enable your internal iSight camera.

Force start a Time Machine backup

One extremely simple but useful feature I found missing in Apple's Time Machine backup solution is the ability to perform a backup to an external partition or hard drive right now. Instead, Time Machine picks when it does the backups for you; typically every hour. Why Apple didn't include a small button in the System Preferences for Time Machine that you could click to force an immediate backup of your data is beyond me. It seems like an easy feature to implement and plenty of room in the Prefs pane to add it and keep things clean. I figured there still had to be a way.



I bought a new MacBook the night that Leopard was released. 6-days later Apple announced upgraded MacBook's with faster processors and over double the VRAM. The cool thing is that Apple Stores give you 15-days to exchange a newly purchased product for and upgraded one. They require that you pay a 10% "restocking fee." In my opinion, the upgraded graphics card was worth a 10% exchange cost.

The issue was that I was in a time crunch. I needed Time Machine to perform an updated, full backup of all of my data right away; not 1-hour from now. Two of the three Apple stores in the area were already sold out of the middle-range MacBook. I needed to hurry. At the very least I needed a Terminal command to copy and paste to force Time Machine to perform an immediate backup of my data.

Run this command to force Time Machine to backup data now:

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper >/dev/null 2>&1 &

Open up your Terminal application in Applications: Utilities: Terminal. Then copy and paste the command above at the prompt. As long as Time Machine is turned on and the selected backup drive is connected to your Mac, this command will force Time Machine to start, making a complete backup of all of your data changes since the last time it ran.

Now I'm off to the Apple Store to exchange my MacBook for a faster, upgraded one!

Update: It turns out that Apple added this option by using the menu of the Time Machine icon in the dock. You can click and hold the icon and select "Back Up Now."