Had a very long day -- as well as taking the time to find the circuit breaker, I spent about 90 minutes on the phone with QuickBooks tech support.
They had pushed an update for QuickBooks out to customers and some systems hung when the update failed to completely install. The store's system was one of these. Payroll should have been done on Sunday the 16th (I pay bi-monthly). The tech support guy was awesome -- I let him know that I had worked for MSFT for five years and that I had a computer store for 12 years before that and he switched from the usual: "Now look at the top of the screen for the little xyzzy thing and double click it with your left mouse button" to OK -- bring up task manager and let me know what's running. Bring up explorer and let me know the file properties of these files -- a lot faster and more efficient. It was 90 minutes as we finally just nuked the install and reinstalled from a sooper-seekret QuickBooks site that had all of the patches already installed.
QuickBooks is an awesome product and their tech support simply rocks... Besides hanging the system, the flaw also corrupted the company files but I have Acronis backing up crucial files every night and Jen is anal about putting a company backup on a thumb drive after every checkbook reconciliation so we did not loose any data.
To add insult to injury, our just-out-of-warranty HP Printer decided to stop recognizing fresh full brand-new black ink cartridges, saying that we needed to install a new cartridge. Shipping the unit back for repair would cost more than a new printer so fuck them -- I bought a new Kodak printer today. I also got a Brother laser printer from Costco as most of our printing is B&W and a laser is that much cheaper to operate so fuck HP's pricey ink yet again. Voting with my dollars... Spent about three hours tonight uninstalling HP drivers and installing the Brother drivers and about 20 minutes running payroll.
Off to the DaveCave(tm)
