I got the damned thing to work—Hallelujah! That’s four IT issues solved in as many days:

1. We downgraded QB from 2016 to 2013 because Intuit pissed us off by forcing an update that would require us to change our passwords every 90 days, and making me spend 45 minutes on the phone with what they laughingly refer to as “tech support”, only to be told that there was no way around the forced password change. I told them our accounting software is not and has never been online, so we’re not going to get “hacked” unless someone literally “hacks” through a steel door in a concrete building with no windows, and a monitored alarm system, but they just kept saying it was for our own protection. We decide when we need protection, so C said Intuit could stuff their  “upgraded” crapware up their arses, I applauded, and we went back to 2013. Fortunately, it hadn’t been long since we’d “upgraded”, so it wasn’t much trouble to manually add in the information created after the file was converted to 2016 format (which I hate…the only reason they do that is an attempt to force upgrades.)

2. B wanted a local printer because he’s had trouble connecting to C’s on the network. The only printer we had available was an old HP that has no 64-bit driver at all, and has insufficient memory to hold its own settings, so therefore must have its firmware flashed every time it starts. That wasn’t happening on his Windows 7 64-bit computer, so I gave him the HP printer I’d been using for my second computer (driver is kind of “hackish” and not really for Win7, or for that printer model, but it works), and I took the one that would have to be run in a virtual machine.

3. We have three full toner cartridges for the printer with no 64-bit driver, plus it’s a workhorse, and we didn’t want to just toss it if I could get it working. I installed it in a virtual machine with the 32-bit driver, shared it, and used a 64-bit driver for a different printer that happens to have the same Zenographics ZJ-stream GDI. That printed text just fine, but would not print images, PDFs or anything generated by QB at all. Not good enough; it’s the printer for QB! I uninstalled it and re-installed it manually, BUT this time, I shared the DOS version of it, and told Win7 to use the driver for a different HP printer. Works like a charm!

4. We use an ooooooold (1998 old) version of DBA Manufacturing for shop parts management. It’s installed on a file server, and workstations connect…except the XP virtual machine would start it, then throw fatal errors when I tried to do an inquiry on a part number, which is literally the only thing I need. I had mapped the network drive, thinking that would be enough because on vanilla XP, it didn’t need anything at all, but for the virtual machine, I ended up having to set a new environment variable path, and it works just fine.

Go, me!