Issue 630 • 27 April – 10 May 2022 37Install a fingerprint reader for Windows
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and is replaced by ‘All set!’
You now have the opportunity to enrol
another finger. This is optional, but we’d
recommend doing so, because it can
sometimes be difficult to use a particular
finger if you’re at an awkward angle. This
is particularly true when using an external
fingerprint reader, as we are here, as you
may move it to a USB port on the
opposite side of your computer, making
it awkward to reach.
Although we would always recommend
setting up separate user accounts for
everyone who uses a computer, we
understand that it can sometimes be
simpler to share a single account
between several members of the same
household. In this case, you should
consider enrolling fingerprints from each
family member who uses the same
account so everyone can benefit from the
simplicity of using the fingerprint reader
to log in.
When you’ve enrolled all the fingers
and thumbs you need, close Settings,
then press Windows+L to lock your
computer. This will take you back to the
screen you see when Windows first starts.
Click it, then click ‘Sign-in options’, and
click the button showing a stylised
fingerprint to switch from using your PIN
to finger recognition. Now touch the end
of the fingerprint reader with one of the
fingers or thumbs you previously enrolled
to unlock your machine.
If, for any reason, fingerprint recognition
doesn’t work, click the keypad button
and enter your PIN as usual, then return
to Settings and repeat the process of
enrolling your fingers and thumbs.3
Remove enrolled digits
You can add and remove
authorised prints whenever
you choose. Although it’s unlikely
anyone would be able to fake your
fingerprint, you may decide that
someone who has access to your device
no longer should have – or you may
suspect that someone has somehow
added their own fingerprint without you
knowing.
To remove all the digits that have
already been enrolled, open Settings
again, then click Accounts followed by
‘Sign-in options’. Click ‘Windows Hello
Fingerprint’, then the Remove button.
Logging in by touch will be immediately
disabled, and you’ll need to repeat the
process of enrolling each finger in turn
for any that you want to reinstate.Windows 11
recognised
our fingerprint
reader
but didn’t
immediately
set it upThe full name of the fingerprint reader
is ‘Benss USB Fingerprint Reader for
Windows 10 Hello’, but you can also
use it in Windows 11. Here’s how we
installed it on our Windows 11 laptop,
though your experience may be
different, depending on the
configuration of your machine. We
can’t therefore guarantee it will work
on all Windows 11 machines.
Our Windows 11 laptop came with a
fingerprint reader. If you’re in the same
position, we’d recommend sticking
with that unless you have a specific
reason for switching to an external
device. We had to manually disable
the internal reader in Device Manager
by selecting it in the Biometric Devices
section, and clicking the red ‘x’ on the
toolbar. This uninstalls it.
As you can see from our screenshot
below, our USB fingerprint reader was
listed in Device Manager’s ‘Otherdevices’ section, as ‘ELAN:Fingerprint’.
This gave us a starting point when
looking for a driver. We manually
searched Microsoft’s Windows Update
catalogue for ‘elan fingerprint’, which
turned up multiple results, as you can see
for yourself at http://www.snipca.com/41437.
So, we re-ordered them by date by
clicking the Last Updated header in the
fourth column (^1 in our screenshot above).
We then downloaded the second most
recent update, for which the link title
was ‘ELAN Finger Print – Biometric –
3.21.12212.12201’^2 , on the basis that it
was a 2.8MB download, where the most
recent was just 348KB.
This doesn’t download the driver
directly. Instead, it pops up a floating
window with a link to a compressed
cabinet (.cab) file. Right-click this and
save it to your Downloads folder.
Our browser, Brave, warned us that it
couldn’t safely download files of that
type, but we chose to trust it on the basis
that the download was coming from
Microsoft. We therefore clicked the
up-pointing arrow at the end of thedownload box
which appeared
at the bottom of
the browser
window, and
clicked Keep on
the menu.
You now need
to extract the
contents of the cabinet file. So, open a
new File Explorer window and
navigate to Downloads. Double-click
the cabinet file you just downloaded to
view its contents. Click and drag over
all of the files in the cabinet to select
them all, then drag them on to the
Downloads entry in the sidebar. This
will copy them out of the cabinet and
into your Downloads folder.
Now return to Device Manager and
right-click the fingerprint reader. Click
‘Update driver’ on the menu, then click
‘Browse my computer for drivers’.
Click ‘Let me pick from a list of
available drivers on my computer’
and, on the next screen, ‘Have Disk...’.
Click ‘Browse’, then navigate to your
Downloads folder in the box that
appears, and click OK. This installed
the driver for the reader.
After closing Device Manager, we
rebooted our computer to make sure
everything was recognised and, after
logging in using our PIN, we enrolled
our fingerprints via Settings using the
newly installed external reader.HOW TO INSTALL ON WINDOWS 11
We clicked ‘Last Updated’ to see the most recent driver updates for the
fingerprint reader1
2