I had some spare time on an airport while on business trip. No internet connection, but still, I turned on my Dell Latitude E6430 and started to playing around with the settings.
I know from earlier that my company badge is NFC enabled smart card. You can use it in the laptop smart card reader for encrypting or cryptographicaly signing an email in outlook for instance. But I wanted to make use of the NFC reader build in into the laptop. Earlier when I was trying to enable biometrics support on the laptop, I probably installed software downloaded from Dell web site: Dell Data Protection – Access (DDPA_Setup_X1C1N_A09_64bits_ZPE.exe).
When you have it, you can run „Setup Wizard“ from the menu, „Create a pre-Windows login“ (which setup bios password and make it possible for you to turn on login by tapping your badge on bios level too) and then „Use my smartcard to login to my system“. It can be even set to let you in without a pin.
I can tell you that it is quite addictive way to login! I noticed that it make me much less reluctant to lock my computer when I leave my seat. Of course if my laptop would be stolen along with my badge, I would be quite screwed. Also if you keep your badge next to your locked laptop, it would make your data completely vulnerable.
My dream is to have nfc ring and use it for locking/unlocking of the computer.