My work laptop is a Lenovo T500 equipped with a fingerprint reader.
When I originally installed Windows 7, I downloaded and installed the drivers for the fingerprint reader from Lenovo’s website. I didn’t realize at the time I was by passing built in Windows functionality.
Don’t get me wrong, the Lenovo software is very functional…never really had any issues, but I prefer Windows native software 90% of the time.
So this morning I set out to fix this. I first uninstalled the Lenovo fingerprint reader software. After a reboot I checked “Biometric Devices” under Control Panel and was disappointed to see a message telling me I didn’t have any compatible fingerprint reader devices. This made little sense as Device Manager clearly showed my Authentec AES2810 and it was properly categorized as a biometric device.
After searching online, I decided to delete the existing driver and let Windows reinstall it. Doing so was successful. After reinstalling, the device was listed in Control Panel as expected. Enrolling fingers launched custom Authentec software (TrueSuite). I enrolled a few fingers and locked my screen to test it out.
I ran into one problem. “Fingerprint reader is not enabled for domain accounts on this machine.”
A quick Google search revealed this article. It’s a simple checkbox in Control Panel.
So it’s all working now. The native reader is a little snappier than the non-native and just barely more consistent with Windows 7 styling. Other than that, there is probably no real advantage. Your mileage may vary, of course.
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