Making my pc a trusted device

Bluenose1940 said:

Hello folks, apologies for late response.

Well yesterday I did a load of fiffing and faffing about and at the end of the day I decided to turn the pc off completely (I don't normally do that, it's usually on 24/7) and then this morning, I booted up and went straight to the bank site and logged in and, absolutely no problems, no request to get the card reader out!!

Don't ask me what I did though, I didn't write anything down. All that I did was to keep trying whatever route I could find via the security screens and well, something worked.

The strange thing is, during the course of the morning I took a photo with my iPhone and, when I tried to extract it from the phone to the pc, all I could get was a message saying this folder is empty. I scoured the internet to see if I could resolve it and I found something and, I had to go to the phone's settings and do something to 'trust' again. Seems that the problem may have been linked in some way.

Anyway, Thank you all for your input, very much appreciated.

FYI RickC, yes it is a Lloyds Business Account, I am Treasurer of a local club. If your trip to Wales was for pleasure, I hope you had an enjoyable day. Pembrokeshire is my favourite county, I have many fond memories, I was at the School of Artillery in the 1950's.

Glad you're past that hump! Best guess is perhaps turning it off and back on this morning, after a long up time, may have cleared some cache and temp files that were getting in the way. It's happened before.

Cheers!

As far as those UK banks that allow you to set your 'device' as trusted are concerned, this means setting a cookie on a particular browser. They are misleading in their terminology.

If you see a message saying something like 'Your computer is unfamiliar to us' it actually means 'the browser you are using doesn't have that particular cookie'.

Therefore if you use computer A and browser A consistently and keep said cookie, you're fine.
If you use computer A and browser B for the first time, you'll be challenged again.

Clearing cookies
If you ever clear cookies for that browser, you'll be challenged again.
Banks and other sites may tell you to clear cache and cookies if you're having problems accessing that site without warning you this may affect your access to other sites- they never mention that.
I (still) use Ccleaner - because it has a useful function to let me readily keep selected cookies.

Some banks/financial sites simply insist on you using 2FA every time anyway (2 factor authentication).

Card readers are interchangeable- keycards (little calculator-like devices) are not.

Do you have any form of cookie blocker? Have you tried that browser in its safe mode? A different browser?