I purchased my Latitude D830 directly from Dell through a phone CSR. When I received my unit, the TPM was working fine and the login screen would accept either my password or my fingerprint, as it should.

Recently my laptop had been getting indeterminable slowdowns and extreme processor activity with no programs active (the two cores - using the MultiMeter sidebar gadget - would hover around 85-95% activity and peak to 100% every few seconds or so.) This would render it nearly useless for all kinds of activity - let alone work. In addition to this, the TPM was refusing to respond to any input - it actively rejected all passwords and fingerprints. I once had the maddening experience of attempting to log into my system over and over and over again for an hour before the OS finally accessed the TPM chip and let me in. So the problem was intermittent, though more often than not, it erred on the NOT WORKING side of things. I also noticed that the rejection of my login data was more often than not instantaneous. That is to say, the instant I swipe my finger or hit enter on my password, I immediately get the invalid username/password error. Other times, it would take anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute, displaying the teal busy icon and the "Welcome" text, only to reject my login data in the end. When I finally managed to log in, I disabled Embassy Wave Security and disabled the TPM in the BIOS as well.


A system diagnostic showed the former error to be indicative of a motherboard defect. On top of other problems (dead LCD pixels, noisy fan and noisy and intermittently defective optical drive), the Philippine ASP eventually replaced the motherboard, the ODD and the LCD. I took the system home and found that the TPM was still rejecting me. I took it back the following day and they replaced the palm rest, where the TPM is located. Even after a fresh reinstallation of the OS (Vista Ultimate), the TPM was still intermittently refusing a login. The strange thing here is, when the Preboot manager is activated, the BIOS accepts both the fingerprint and the password without any problems, and always on the first try. But when it boots up into Windows, it still refuses my login data.

I never had this problem in the first four months of ownership, and we've replaced all parts short of a full system replacement so it's definitely not a hardware issue. We've reinstalled the OS nearly half a dozen times over the last week, and we've updated all the drivers and TPM software from UPEK to the latest versions, so it's not a software issue either. The ASP techs have no idea what's going on and neither do I. I can't afford to go on without TPM due to the data on my system - and besides, not using it seems like a waste of the money I paid for it.

Does anyone here have any clue what I can do about this?