My old PC running under MS XP Pro finally crashed and gave up the ghost, requiring me to get a new PC which runs under MS Vista. My Quickbooks 2003, which has served me well for some years and meets my reasonably limited requirements, will not load properly or run under Vista. I have my backups of QB but can't run them in any current environment, I would also not want to lose my past years company information. The obvious course is to obtain a more recent version of QB, load the backup and go forward.
I have 2 questions;
1) has anyone found this course of action problematic? and
2) is there a better solution given my small business accounting needs and processing limitations?
Your experiences will be of great assistance.
Bob Love
Replies (5)
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Problem is Vista
Your problem is your new operating system Vista - it is not backward compatible - its a way of forcing you to upgrade your software.
The simplist answer is to overwrite Vista with Windows XP - its stable and very cheap to buy.
Virtual machine ....
Why dump Vista?
Alternatively try running XP as a virtual machine inside Vista, which should allow you to toggle between both OS
John is basically correct
2003 will not run on Vista though 2008 is definitely compatible - maybe you need to partion your hard disk
Options
I thought that you could have an XP "window" in Vista to run XP programs. May be wrong about that though so someone may correct me, but, if that is the case, you can keep your QB2003. We have bought two PCs recently and had XP installed on both. Our IT supplier said that a high percentage of his customers were avoiding Vista.
Other QB options are QB2008 and QB2006. A lot of problems have been reported with QB2008, particularly with regard to VAT and QB2008 does not handle multicurrency. So if you handle VAT or use multicurrency the consensus advice seems to be to avoid QB2008.
QB2006, which Intuit are only offering because QB2008 doesn't handle multicurrency, is stable and not much different to QB2003 - the File VAT routine is the major difference. On balance, this appears to be the one to go for.
Of course you could change to a completely new software.
John