QuickBooks Pro 2009 & Windows Vista 64-bit Printing Problem

Ever since I upgraded my computer to Windows 64-bit, as well as QuickBooks 2009 up from 2007, I’ve experienced a lot of lock-ups with QuickBooks. More specifically, these lock-ups would occur whenever I tried reconciling accounts, saving an invoice or estimate as a PDF, or sending an invoice via E-mail from within QuickBooks. Upon further troubleshooting, I discovered that the QuickBooks PDF Converter “printer” was erroring out with the document stuck in its queue. It was also setting itself as a default printer as well. Needless to say this was extremely annoying and NOTHING worked…until now.

I tried everything initially. Reloaded the PDF Converter numerous times by deleting it and letting QB rebuild it, upgraded to 2009 R2 web patch, and a bunch of other miscellaneous things. I was about to pick up the phone and call QuickBooks for $79 dollars a month. How lame! It’s a rip-off to pay a software vendor for support when it’s their own software that has bugs and doesn’t work! Googling like crazy, I finally came across this Knowledge Base article from Intuit’s site:

http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/Pages/KnowledgeBaseArticle/1007856

I was finally able to fix this annoying issue by following the steps to make the PDF Converter compatible with settings in a 64-bit OS environment. I’ve copied and pasted the exact steps below for our future reference:

Windows Vista:

1. Make sure that you are logged in as a user with administrator rights.
2. Click the Windows button, select Control Panel, and click Printers.
3. Right-click the QuickBooks PDF Convertericon and select Run as administrator and Properties.
4. Click Continue.
5. Select the Ports tab, then click the Add Port… button.
6. Select Local Port and click the New Port… button.
7. Enter PDF1 for the new port name and click OK. Close the Printer Ports window.
8. Ensure that the PDF1 port is selected in the Ports list.
9. Select the Advanced tab.
10. Select the Spool print documents radio button to make the options below it clickable.
11. Clear (uncheck) the box labeled Enable advanced printing features.
12. Select the Print directly to printer radio button again.
13. Ensure that Amyuni Document Converter 300 is selected in the Driver: drop-down arrow
14. Click the Apply button, and then click OK.
15. Important: In order for the changes to take effect, you must restart your computer.
    Reboot your computer and then try to print, email, or create a pdf from QuickBooks.

64-bit computing is GREAT, but beware of pesky little issues like these. Mental note to self: Whenever upgrading to 64-bit, make sure ALL hardware is compatible (i.e. have compatible 64-bit versions of drivers) AND make sure that software “printers” like PDF converters are also compatible. There are three other printers loaded on my system: Dell 3110cn Color Laser Printer (networked and fully 64-bit compliant – works great), Adobe PDF (from Acrobat 9 which is fully 64-bit compatible), and Microsoft XPS Document Write from Office 2007 (I never use it but it does work fine).

Now I can get back to business!

Intel Matrix Storage RAID-5 woes

I am currently in the process of building myself a new server. This server will primarily serve as a file server as well as a learning platform for Windows Server 2008 and other various utilities such as Microsoft CRM 4.0, System Center, and others that come with the Microsoft Action Pack Subscription. I’m a Microsoft Partner so I was able to pass a test and literally be able to purchase tens of thousands of dollars worth of Microsoft software for just $299, all legally.

My original intention was to build my server with six identical 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATAII hard drives in a RAID-5, with 100GB of the 3.5TB partitioned as the C: drive. However, the RAID array never seemed to initialize properly. I had left the IMSM BIOS utility overnight for 2 whole days with it saying “Initialize”. Finally, I lost patience and gave up on it – especially after I had read some forum comments about Intel’s Matrix RAID slowness in initialization. I immediately tried setting up a RAID-1 array of two of the 750GB hard drives. The initilization was instant and it was immediately available and ready with a status of “Normal”. I then decided to RAID-5 the remaining four hard drives. Again, the initialization was instant and it was immediately available and ready with a status of “Normal”. At this point, I probably should have deleted the arrays and tried the full six disk RAID-5 array creation once more. But, I went ahead and went with the Server 2008 install. The down side to this RAID-1 and RAID-5 mixed setup is I basically “wasted” 1.5 TB of potential space, as two of the 750 GB hard drives have to be dedicated to the RAID-1 mirroring and the RAID-5 parity (although parity is actually distributed across ALL disks, equaling approximately 750GB total for parity data).

The next step was the installation of Server 2008 Standard Edition, x64. I have 8 GB of RAM installed on a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard with the Intel P35 chipset and a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz CPU. The hardware is definitely not server-grade, but it works well for a budget server and so far everything has been installed and running without a hitch. I’m fully going to rely on the RAID-1 and RAID-5 for my nearline backups and an online backup subscription to MozyPro for the more serious business data. This server will finally be the central hub for all of my data – photos, music, videos, documents, e-mail, and business-related data.

So the moral of the story here with Intel Matrix RAID is this: It’s great for a low-cost, budget PC or server but it definitely lacks when it comes to true RAID benefits and performance. A true RAID solution would have, at a minimum, support for up to 8 drives in a RAID-5, battery backup, and onboard dedicated RAM for RAID caching. These RAID solutions costs upwards of $500 for an add-on card alone. The Intel Matrix RAID costs $0 when it’s already included in certain motherboards.