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    M17 / General Fingerprint Reader Windows 8 issue.

    Discussion in 'Alienware Area-51/Aurora and Legacy Systems' started by arr0whead, Jan 7, 2013.

  1. arr0whead

    arr0whead Newbie

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    Fingerprint reader AuthenTec AES 1610 stopped working.

    My laptop is an old Alienware M17 which I just upgraded to Windows 8 (clean Installation).

    The Fingerprint reader AuthenTec AES 1610 was working fine for the first days, I was logging into Windows 8 after locking the screen, signing out or rebooting using my Fingerprint reader.

    Now it suddenly stopped working yesterday for no apparent reason.

    Device manager says the the "device is working properly" but in Control Panel > Biometric Devices it says the fingerprint reader is "unavailable".
    All drivers & software are updated to the latest versions available from AuthenTec. I even tried downgrading the drivers to older versions, uninstalling rebooting and installing again various times with no success. Computer is not allowed to turn device off in order to save power.

    I googled around for a while and it seems to be a common issue across multiple notebook brands with all kinds of fingerprint readers and windows 8. I think it has something to do with some recent Windows updates. I ran some updates that day it stopped working.

    Anyone else who has experienced this problem please contribute to this thread. Any solutions found please post them. This is not a random, unique issue.
     
    arr0whead, Jan 7, 2013
    #1
  2. Mr. Fox

    Mr. Fox BGA Filth-Hating Elitist®

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    Did you try using System Restore to roll back to a date it was working correctly?
     
    Mr. Fox, Jan 7, 2013
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  3. arr0whead

    arr0whead Newbie

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    unfortunately windows did not create any useful recovery points, which surprised me since I thought it would automatically create a system restore point with every windows update (maybe that was only a Servicepack function in XP...). Otherwise it might have been possible to rule out a single action that caused this,
     
    arr0whead, Jan 8, 2013
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  4. Mr. Fox

    Mr. Fox BGA Filth-Hating Elitist®

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    Any system restore point on a date prior to the time it stopped working is potentially a useful one, since most driver and configuration changes performed after that specific date will be undone. If you don't have any restore point for dates before the problem started, then you're out of luck on that.

    I have found a couple of things that initially work with Windows 8 and suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. In some ways it seems to have a mind of its own.
     
    Mr. Fox, Jan 9, 2013
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