"Device Manager" on a Mac computer?

[Ichinisan]

I'm going to have to look at the big boss' computer later and it's a Mac. I'm not familiar with Macs, though I have been able to resolve networking issues in the past by tinkering with them.

He needs to get a USB webcam working with it if possible. I would assume that there would be some kind of an error message if Mac OS needed drivers for it, but I'm also not sure if such an error would be suppressed. In Windows you can tell it to stop asking for drivers for a particular unrecognized device, so I'm not sure if something like this may be keeping the computer from asking for drivers.

If a video input device is recognized by Mac OS, is there a way to tell? Is there an OS component that displays video streams? Is there a built-in IM program that has a way to quickly test the webcam without actually starting a video conversation?

I haven't even seen the machine yet, so I'm not sure if the OS is asking for software or not. I just want to be ready since I'm going to look at it in about 1 minute.

 

[LtPage1]

To see if the OS is able to use the webcam, open up iChat, then go iChat>Preferences, and click the video tab. If it's not working, it probably won't tell you. You can try looking around in System Profiler to see if it's recognized at all; but either way, you're going to end up looking for a driver online if it doesn't work automatically.