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:
- Make sure that you are logged in as a user with administrator rights.
- Click the Windows
button, select Control Panel, and click Printers. - Right-click the QuickBooks PDF Convertericon and select Run as administrator and Properties.
- Click Continue.
- Select the Ports tab, then click the Add Port… button.
- Select Local Port and click the New Port… button.
- Enter PDF1 for the new port name and click OK. Close the Printer Ports window.
- Ensure that the PDF1 port is selected in the Ports list.
- Select the Advanced tab.
- Select the Spool print documents radio button to make the options below it clickable.
- Clear (uncheck) the box labeled Enable advanced printing features.
- Select the Print directly to printer radio button again.
- Ensure that Amyuni Document Converter 300 is selected in the Driver: drop-down arrow
- Click the Apply button, and then click OK.
- 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!
Tags: 64-bit, PDF converter, printing, quickbooks 2009, vista