These features make USB cameras the easiest to install. Please note that in order to take advantage of the USB hardware on your PC, you need to be running at least Windows 95 OSR 2.1 or later, Windows 98, Windows ME, or Windows 2000. Using a PC camera that connects to your PC through an internal card has one big advantage over parallel and USB ports. An internal card does a lot of the processing that is associated with video, which means your computer's CPU doesn't have to. One drawback of using an internal card is that it is a little harder to install, since you have to open up your computer.
Internal cards have many other features.
If you own a camcorder, you won't even need to buy a PC camera if you get one of these video caputre cards, just use your camcorder. You can also play back pre-recorded videos through your videoconferencing software. See the next section for information on which to choose. If you have a newer computer, your computer will probably have expansion slots for PCI cards and possibly also ISA cards. If you have an older PC, your computer may only have slots that accept ISA cards.