Where has my picture password login sign in gone on Windows 8?

I have had a Surface 2 for about six months. It is great for watching videos on the train, or a bit of browsing, but don’t like it for note taking in meetings. This is a shame, as this is what I got it for; a light device with good battery life to take to meetings. What I needed was something I could hand write on in OneNote, an electronic pad. The Surface 2 touch screen is just not accurate enough.

After Rik’s glowing review I have just got a Dell Venue 8 Pro and stylus. I setup the Dell with a picture password and all was OK for a while, I could login via a typed password or a picture as you would expect. However the picture password sign-in option disappeared from the lock/login screen at some point after running the numerous update and application installation I needed.

I am not 100% certain, but I think the issue is that when I configured the Windows 8 Mail application to talk to our company Exchange server I was asked to accept some security settings from our domain. I think this blocked picture password for non-domain joined devices. I joined the Dell to our domain (you can do this as it is Atom not ARM based , assuming you re willing to do a reinstall with Windows 8 Pro) and this seems to have fixed my problem. I have installed all the same patches and apps and I still have the picture password option.

So roll on the next meeting to see if I can take reasonable hand written notes on it, and that OneNote desktop manages to get them converted to text.