AmberCutie's Forum
An adult community for cam models and members to discuss all the things!

MFC technical issues

  • ** WARNING - ACF CONTAINS ADULT CONTENT **
    Only persons aged 18 or over may read or post to the forums, without regard to whether an adult actually owns the registration or parental/guardian permission. AmberCutie's Forum (ACF) is for use by adults only and contains adult content. By continuing to use this site you are confirming that you are at least 18 years of age.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Mar 2, 2011
3
0
45
I'm an MFC member that's a regular of one of the models on MFC that's been experiencing some oddball issues with MFC. Since she's not very technical at all, and since I work in the IT industry, I offered to help her figure out what was wrong, thinking it would be an easy fix. Unfortunately, this issue baffling me, and I decided to break down and see if anyone here could offer some guidance.

The problem is she has a logitech 9000 cam thats been running fine on an older beat up laptop running Windows 7. This laptop works ok and doesn't have any problems other than performance issues. She went out and bought a new laptop (Actually she's on her 3rd laptop trying to fix this problem) running Windows 7 to get around the performance issues she was experiencing.

Unfortunately, now when she goes to connect to MFC it fails to open her room and let her on cam. She's described the issue to me and she gets on MFC, but when she clicks the second button to open her room, she gets a failed to respond type error. She winds up having to continuously clicking that button to open her room, and log on and off multiple times, before it will let her in.

Initially she thought it was the new laptop, so she returned it and got a different laptop, and experienced the same problem. She's wound up buying 3 new laptops (She's had a Dell, Toshiba, and HP) thinking thats what the problem is. After the last laptop, she started asking me for help.

I went threw some basic troubleshooting issues with her, with no luck. I initially thought it might have been her cam, so I had her disconnect the logitech cam and attempt to use the built-in cam, and she still experienced the same issue. Something is obviously different between the originally working laptop and the new laptops shes bought, but I can't figure out what it could be.

I am assuming the MFC installation process isn't that difficult, but could she be misconfiguring it? Are their any MFC software requirements she could have ignored, that I'm not aware of? She said she's on MFC version 2.2. Someone suggested she might need the latest version of flash (Although I would think 3 new laptops would have a version that would work with MFC).

Thank you in advance for anyone assistance. I would be very grateful for any guidance anyone could offer.
 
The MFC software for the models to do their video stream isn't exactly the best. Even if you have a good internet connection, a good computer, and a good camera, it can still boot you off or give you issues logging in, starting up your video feed, etc. Often I think loss of connection can be attributed to the servers and the amount of traffic that is incoming/outgoing.

It's a basic "click download, click run, click install" and it's done so there's really no way to mess up installing it.

However, is she using the administrative account on her laptop? I'm pretty sure Win7 has the "hidden" admin account so sometimes it won't let you download/use certain things as initially the computer is set up as a regular user so that people are less likely to download/install things that can be damaging, or fuck their computer up somehow. She might have to access the admin account to get full privileges over her computer programs/functions.

I'm not sure what else it could be if she went through three new laptops and is still having issues, since older laptops generally don't have the hidden admin account, but it's a pretty standard setup on XP, Vista and 7. The actual build of the laptop (Toshiba, HP, etc) doesn't change the fact that Microsoft has hidden the admin account in its new operating systems.
 
Skulliee,
Thank you for the reply, and patients with helping me with this issue. I do not know for a fact (yet) she's using the admin account, I am assuming she is, but will verify it. As I'm sure you can imagine, the issue is frustrating her quite a bit, as it happens when ever she attempts to log in. She'll spend 5-10 minutes attempting to open her room & start her cam, by continually clicking the 2nd button, and/or restarting the MFC model application.

She had e-mailed the MFC admins for technical help, but whatever they sent her didn't help her at all, and thats when she asked me to get involved. During my search for an answer today, I did stumble on the MFC wiki model technical help page, so I will try and step her threw some of these solutions.

Once again, thank you for your suggestion

http://myfreecamswiki.com/wiki/Technical_Help
 
Also make sure the anti-virus or firewalls and pop ups are set right. Make sure the cam drivers and flash are up to date. When I crashed and recovered my laptop, it argued with my Logitech 9K, so I had to uninstall the cam and the model software. Then FIRST upload a current flash, current drivers and lastly the MFC program. Then mine straightened out.Also log into her old comp and make sure that it isn't STILL logged in. Done that before too, and it conflicts because the IP addys are confusing the MFC programs somehow.
 
I know nothing about the MFC software, but she might try right-clicking on the icon to run it and choose "Run as an administrator" rather than just double-clicking on it to run it. It will pop up warning you that the program may make changes to your computer, blah blah blah, just accept that. Not sure if that will do any good but it will run the software as an admin if she isn't already logged in as one.
 
Reptilian97 is on the right track in my humble opinion. Windows Vista and Windows 7 were a major push by Microsoft to make their OS more secure. This led to something that I personally think is both great and terrible. Unless you are logged in as Administrator (literally the account named administrator), when you run something it runs at User or Power User level privileges. The benefit to this is that random installation that gets run via Java drive-by cannot install with administrator credentials. If your account has Administrator (the group) privileges, you can right click and choose run as Administrator to elevate that executable's rights. If you need a program to ALWAYS run with elevated privileges, you right click the icon and go to properties, there should be a Compatibility tab and near the bottom there should be a check box that says Run this program as an administrator. It's, unfortunately, grayed out for some programs (Internet Explorer) because of some logic employed by Microsoft. It is often important to run the installers as administrators if they have not been updated to prompt the user to elevate their rights during installation.

If you're hard headed and want everything to work more like Windows XP as far as rights go, you can take a big risk by just always logging in as the local administrator. To activate your local administrator account, you'll need to be on another account in the Administrators group. You'll run a command prompt as administrator and use the following command.
Code:
net user Administrator /active:yes
You will then need to go set a password for the Administrator account. The easiest way to do that since you already have a command prompt open is to type
Code:
control userpasswords2
Go to the Advanced tab on the dialog that opens then click the Advanced button. The MMC will load up with a Local Users and Groups snap-in. Under Users you should see Administrator listed. If you right click on it, you can choose Set Password... and from there it's up to you to choose a password. I am not sure if the Local Users and Groups snap-in is available to Windows Home Premium so you may need to go through User Accounts and Family Safety in Control Panel to set the Administrator password if you're not running Professional or Ultimate.

Yeah... Windows 7 is kind of my thing as of late.
 
The "phony" administrator account on Vista/7 is really annoying and a lot of people don't even realize they're not actually using the real admin account with the full privileges and sometimes that's the reason why some of their programs don't work correctly.

Fail @ Microsoft.
 
If you think about it, Skullie, it is quite similar to how administrator accounts work on both Mac OS and Linux/Unix based boxes. Sure you have the rights to do things as an administrator... but you're going to need to sudo if you expect it to work. You could log in a root to do things... but it's for an extra level of security. I believe the REAL problems are 1. Microsoft needs a better kind of notification system when something doesn't work saying "Hey... try running this with elevated privileges. and 2. Windows users have become so used to the old way of doing things they have a hard time getting used to a slightly new method. :)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.