OK. I admit it!  I have an older computer.  Can you believe it only has a 30GB hard drive -- in a day and age when 200+++ hard drives are the norm.  About 1 GB of RAM wehn 3GB is the minimum to run Vista and Office together?

So anyway, my local Association is getting ready to mutate, er, I mean migrate over to Sentriolock from Supra.  A lot of other Associations in the neighborhood have already done this but mine is waiting for the Supra contract to expire.

Long story short, I went and bought the new Sentrilock card and card reader so I could show property in the surrounding Associations that have already mutated, er, migrated. 

Well, I loaded the software onto my computer and attached the hardware and it won't work.  It seems like there is some arcane Windows glitch or something that won't read the hardward.  Weird.  To their credit, Sentrilock tech support tried to help -- even on a Sunday night.  But the only solution they could come up with is to call Microsoft to see why the SmartCard service under my Administrative Tools in my Control Panel is giving me the "Error 5: Access is denied" error and not starting my SmartCard service.

Of course we all know that Microsoft support:

a) costs a bundle
b) involves being on hold for an inordinate amount of time  
c) doesn't support hardware and
d) doesn't support suftware that doesn't have Microsoft written all over it.

So, it looks like I'm being pushed down the path toward a new computer.  Like it or not, if I want to stay in business after our local Association finally flips the switch from Supra to Sentrilock I'll be "Out of Business" unless I can get Geeks on Call  (not free either) or someone to help me out.  Or buy a new computer.

Arrrgh!!!