Every moral has a story...

What a crazy last two days!!! Long story coming....no, you can't buy DAK at a computer store, sadly.

My son's car needed an oil change. The car dealership said they'd have his car for several hours. So, he called and asked if I'd pick him up at a nearby computer store that he could walk to. If I could pick him up, he could be at home while the car was being worked on. Since I'm such a good mom, I said sure. Keep in mind, this store is about 11 miles from my house.

Trip 1, going to pick up the son from the computer store. The drama begins. I can't resist looking at stuff in a computer store and noticed they had some refurbished laptops with WINDOWS XP on them!!!! Since DAK works great with XP, I don't own a laptop and kind of think I need one, Windows XP is a rare dinosaur, it was a reasonable price, I thought this would be good insurance/backup for when I no longer have a computer that works with DAK. So went my fairly reasonable thought process. As a result, I happily took an IBM Thinkpad home with me. Took me a couple of hours to get connected to the internet, download and install Norton anti-virus, download updates for the anti-virus, upgrade the XP stuff from Microsoft, stuck in DAK to see if it liked its new home, etc. etc. etc. I was minding my own business, surfing, etc. and suddenly the blue screen of death came up and said "Hardware failure. Return computer to administrator/seller" or something like that. These laptops were used by businesses and then (supposedly) refurbished. So, even though I couldn't turn the d*** thing off, I could get the disk out. I put everything back together and returned the laptop to the store and got an exchange. Trip 2. No problem.

Did all the preparation as described above with the Thinkpad laptop replacement. Something niggled at me and I finally realized there was no sound on this computer. Went to every place on the computer that deals with sound and increased the volume to the max. Went to the website and downloaded a new driver. Nothing worked. Getting disgusted now! Too many hours invested. So I uninstalled DAK, packed everything up and returned to the store for a REFUND. Trip 3. Done with this nonsense!

They were really nice about it at the store and I was feeling pretty good about my decision to quit messing around with a refurbished computer. I'll take my chances with the two computers I have at home that work fine with DAK.

When I got home, I thought I would convert a Dale of Norway baby graph to a stitch pattern and start working on a sweater for the little guy. YIKES!!! no DAK disk. (I always run DAK from the disk.) Absolute panic when I realized I returned the disk to the store, still in the laptop's cd drive. I called the store and the employee (John the phone guy) sounded a bit irritated but said he'd look for the computer and see if the disk was still there, then call me back. This is a big computer store, a national chain, and I thought there was a possibility that the computer was already on a truck ready to be transported somewhere. Had already rationalized in my head the purchase of a replacement DAK disk. I was almost in tears when...........brinnnnnnnnng! The phone rang, he had it, I could come pick it up. Geeze Louise!!! I think if I hadn't wanted to work on DAK right away, the computer and disk would have been gone. Thanked my lucky stars. 4 round trips in two days. Don't even care about the wasted, expensive gas anymore.

Moral of the story: USE YOUR DAK EVERY DAY!

PS Car got its oil change. On one of those trips, the son got transported to his car. I was so focused on the DAK and the stubborn laptop, I can't even remember where in the sequence I took him to the car place. After all, first things first.