My friend had a fingerprint scanner on her old laptop, I always found these to be a bit too excessive in terms of security.

The fingerprint scanner seems like an idiot's tool. Someone who doesn't have to remember their password because they're always carrying it with them. Sounds like a good idea in theory, but unless you can get a scan with everyone 90% of the time (needing maybe a second scan because of issues) then i don't see it as a viable use.

On the other hand if you can get the fingerprint scanner to output as hex-based text, it would be interesting to see the output. Maybe use two fingers xored and then you use that as a seed for some interesting stuff.

If laptop manufacturers moved to the fingerprint technology of current mobile devices instead of sticking to early-mid 2000s technology they would be a lot more reliable and probably be more commonly accepted, but then again since windows 8 you can now use 4 digit pass codes in place of a traditional passwords which work just as quickly. There's also facial recognition as a log in option too which I haven't played with to much but from what I've seen it does a relatively decent job.

Dell will continue to have the same problem it always has, they buy the cheapest of the cheap products, cut corners and hash everything together to produce a cheap product (which is also a complete nightmare to do repairs on) and then claim they're doing people a service and giving them a good deal.