precision – My Rantings, Ravings and Thoughts

Dell Precision M6400 Windows 7 Fingerprint reader

Jun 102011

Ok, here goes, I have been having issues with my laptop locking up, which is for another post, and i finally decided to bite the bullet and do a install of Windows 7 x64 again. I remember last time I did the reinstall I could not get my fingerprint reader installed and while doing research I found many having issue with it, so I figured just give up and let it go. This time I posted on the dell support forum and someone pointed me towards an 0ld post which talked about XP and mentioned the three installs they needed to make it work so I went to the driver download for dell and downloaded:

– DELL_CONTROLPOINT-SECURITYMGR-Manager
– Dell_ControlPoint-Security-Driver pack
– Dell_ControlVault

in whatever version was on the site for my laptop, first I installed the driver pack and rebooted, then installed the control vault (after that I had to manually run the firmware update since windows 7 does not run the bat file correctly….so I ran the ushupgrade.exe app from the firmware directory that was created by the control vault and watched it complete correctly. Then I ran the Security mgr setup and rebooted and low and behold I was able to set fingerprints then after a reboot I was actually able to log in using those fingerprints. Woohoo. Now I do realize that Windows 7 does not see the fingerprint reader well enough to actually use it for passwords for apps that are running, like roboform etc, but at least I do not need to type in my password for windows now. Hopefully that helps some people and hopefully I can figure out how to make it work for apps as well.

Experiencing random lockups on my laptop with Windows 7

Computers, Hardware, Software No Responses »

Jun 022011

I have been having a problem on my Dell Precision M6400, where Windows 7 was starting to lockup, not where the mouse would stop working but enough of a lockup that any application I could click on was rendered useless with the spinning orb. I ran antivirus scan, a spyware scan, a malware scan, cleaned out my hard drives, defragged the HD, performed a sfc /scannow, even checked my hijackthis, and nothing stood out. This lockup would happen anywhere from 15 minutes to 2-3 hours after a boot, and was getting very hard to find. I went back to another problem I had early on with this laptop, heat, I fired up speedfan, which can be acquired here http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php for free, the temperatures looked weird but not out of the ordinary, or so I thought. That’s when I started to run out of ideas, but I did think it seems to happen when I am looking at something a bit more taxing on my graphics card, so I went to nvidia’s site and grabbed the video drivers for my quadra 2700 FX card, installed them, rebooted and looked at the temperatures again, the GPU temperature dropped almost 20 degrees Celsius and changed the ambient temperature quite a bit as well, and the laptop has been running for 10 or so hours now with no issues of locking up.

Just wanted to throw this out for anyone else that may have troubles.