How Secure Is Microsoft's Fingerprint Reader?

Moos3d asks: "I recently found out about this Microsoft Fingerprint Reader at the library and ever since then I have been fascinated by using something like this for my own PC. How secure is this compared to using multiple 10+ character long passwords? Some people I've talked to seem to think it isn't safe at all and some people seem to think it is only safe for casual use. I only plan to use it for online forums and other applications that don't require great measures of security so it seems to be perfect for me, but how secure do you think it really is?"

Comments

Review..

[delus10n0]

I had one of these units for about a week, then returned it and got my money back. The password vault software will work with FireFox, yet Microsoft has disabled it. It will even go through the same "click the box where you enter your password" routine; it just never saves the XML password data properly. Contacting Microsoft tech. support, they informed me that the only application they designed it to work with is Internet Explorer and the Windows logon process.

Pfft.

I'd rather just use a password management system, anyhow. There's plenty of free and open source ones out there, even for Windows. After entering my long passphrase (about 20 characters) I have access to all of my forum logins, etc..