Every once in a while the AuthenTec AES2810 fingerprint reader on my Dell Studio 17 laptop stops working. At the Windows 7 login screen, the fingerprint login option says "Reader not detected". This happens randomly after coming out of hibernation. I've tried a variety of things to fix this; rebooting has been the only thing that takes care of it.

However, I decided to do some more checking since it just happened again and I was able to kick-start it sans a reboot. So I have this documented, here's two possibilities for fixing this (I wasn't sure which did it since, silly me, I was trying the first while the second was still installing):

1.) Verify the "AuthenTec Fingerprint Service" service is running and set to "Automatic" startup type.

2.) Use the 8.5.0.251 driver version from Dell's support web site.

This seems to have resolved the issue for me for the time being at least.

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