Who would have thought that running a simple pre installed application on my company laptop would cause me so many problems . . .
“running a simple, pre installed application”
I’ve had a Lenovo T440 that has a fingerprint scanner for about a year. It runs Windows 8.0 that is built to meet my employer’s security requirements. That scanner has never worked and has been about as much use as a match in a furnace. Last Friday afternoon just before heading out for a first Friday peal I came across the pre installed “Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro”. OK, lets have a look and see what this does was my first thought. (Actually, after a year I had just started to get an understanding of Windows 8).
“Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro”
On first looks it seemed the application would let me use the fingerprint reader and promised me logon and to access the laptop from the screen saver. Good! That could save me 20 -30 seconds a day. I haven’t got time to set it up now, but I must have a look at this next week. I closed the application in the expectation that I would carry on next week when I had a little more time. What I didn’t know, and what it didn’t tell me, was that on closing the application it was going to patch Windows 8 to disable domain logins, enable local login against a fingerprint I hadn’t trained and an account that didn’t exist.
I knew something was wrong when I tried to wake the laptop. Ctr+Alt+Delete didn’t give the usual boxes for username and password. Nope, just a blank screen with the fingerprint scanner turned on.
No way to enter username and password for a cached domain logon!
And that is pretty much when I knew the only way back was a total rebuild. The installed security software made it impossible to read the disk; so everything on there, which includes 17 years of mail archives and the last three weeks of work have gone.
“17 years of mail archives and the last three weeks work have gone”
It’s a bit of a blow! Even desktop support said, “ah, we’ve seen this before. You could probably do with the latest build.”