Great little PC gadget

I didn't really need this, but I figured it would make me feel important if I had to use a fingerprint scanner to get access to my PC. I've owned it for about 6 months now and it hasn't worn off yet. For a supplement to the Windows XP login screen, it works rather well.

After installing, I set up a profile for myself by scanning a few of my fingerprints (so as long as you don't lose *both* hands, you can still get access to your PC with it). So far, it's been 100% accurate, in that I haven't had it fail to identify a fingerprint that it should know about, and it consistently rejects any unknown fingerprint. That being said, they tell you not to use it as a serious security measure for a reason: it can be fooled. Someone determined to fake your fingerprint can do it with a few household goods.

In addition to replacing your username and password selection at login time, it also can trigger Fast User Switching in XP, letting you move between user profiles without needing to go to the login screen at all. The other user just scans his/her fingerprint and XP will immediately switch to their profile. Very slick.

There are four situations where the fingerprint reader fails to perform:

The first is when my system is bogged down with running applications. The software that actually interprets the fingerprint runs in memory like anything else, and if it's swapped out of memory for some reason, it may take it a moment to get swapped back in. Consequently, you may find yourself hitting the fingerprint reader a few times before it actually gets read by the software.

Sometimes, especially when I've recently logged in over Remote Desktop, it will take my PC a while to bring up my profile, since the screen needs to be resized, and windows shuffled around. If this process takes too long, my new and fingerprint-enhanced login process will appear to time out and dump me back out to the login screen. Usually logging in a second time sticks.

If your profile uses a screen saver, and is set to return to the welcome screen when the screen saver is interrupted, bear in mind that the fingerprint reader won't actually let you in until that time. If you try to use the fingerprint reader while the screen saver is running (or the monitors powered down due to power management settings), it won't actually do anything except bring up the Fingerprint Logon menu, since you're still technically logged in. You have to interrupt the screen saver by moving the mouse or hitting a key first, wait for the login screen to come up, and *then* you can use the fingerprint reader to log in.

Finally, my fourth complaint is centered around the Fingerprint Logon feature, where you can use the fingerprint reader to trigger filling in username/password prompts on web sites (and perhaps other types of applications). This doesn't work at all for me. But that could be something to do with my PC and not necessarily the product. Surely this feature worked well enough for them to ship with it.

Aesthetically, it's small and looks fancy. The red light is on all of the time, and in a dark room, it's pretty bright. But it's necessary, and I get used to it. The glass reader surface itself has a soft gummy layer to it (probably designed to make the fingerprint stand out) that gets dirty very easily. I suspect a brute force attempt at cleaning it off would damage it. I've found that clear tape works well to remove the stuff that builds up on it, but it looks dirty again after only one or two more scans.