MS Fingerprint Reader

This is really cool... no more having to remember loads of different passwords! The software hooks into the Windows shell, so once you're registered your fingerprints you can log in just by scanning a finger.

What's really cool is that you can also use it with any application or web page that has a login form. You load up the page in IE, scan your finger, and up pops the password manager dialog where you specify the required input for each field (id, password, etc), which button or action to take to submit the page, and that's it! Whenever you load the page in future, you just scan your finger and you're logged in! The software is really well written and it works a treat, and also saves each login page as a "quick link", on a menu that pops from the tray icon when you scan your finger (scanning is context sensitive, so if you're at a login page it knows about, it will log you in, prompt you for credentials if it doesn't know about it, or otherwise pops the tray menu). Saves loads of tedious typing...

One niggle: I had a problem during installation which lead to the installer program hanging; it was failing to start or stop the Biometric Authenication service (which it installs for you), and cancelling the setup didn't roll this back, so I had to manually clean this up before attempting the installation again; disabling my firewall during installation seemed to do the trick (I also downloaded the latest software from the MS site), but not exactly ideal...