Expert: Todd Binenstock - 8/24/2006

Question
I have been doing some work for a company by setting up their computers & network and they are using Quickbooks.  They were using the 2005 Premier Edition up until today when I upgraded them to Quickbooks 2006 Premier.  It took about SIX hours to install the program and ALL of its patches to take it from Release 1 to Release 7 on five computers (including the server).  Granted the company .QBW file is 401 MB and the power went out about 3/4 of the way through the first time when we had start over.  Other than that, there were no technical glitches and things went smoothly, but it took forever!  One thing that slowed the process was when Quickbooks was verifying the integrity of the file before it was being backed up.  It would "get stuck" on 19% on the progress bar when trying to back up.  Do you have any other thoughts on why it took so long?  Is there anything that can speed up Quickbooks that you know of?  Do you think the program has too many unnecessary .dll's or other files that makes it too slow?  Are Quicken and Microsoft Money faster or better than Quickbooks?  They are not using it for payroll but they do use it for billing purposes.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!


Answer
Hi.  I have no expertise in Quickbooks.  That being said, I fear I have a compulsion to attempt an answer, anyway.  Take it for what it's worth.  

If the problem occurred at 19% on each installation, then there is a problem with Quickbooks in general or on your particular environment (hardware and/or OS version).  It usually makes sense to apply patches to bring the OS and other software up to date.

In general, when windows applications get "stuck" (freezing up) when reading or writing files, typically the problem revolves around a corruption in the file system, which connects the stored fragments which make up the  files stored on your hard disk.  The system always uses virtual memory, swapping data from physical RAM to the disk to free up memory.  Counterintuitively, the more RAM installed on your system, the more swapping occurs.  The more swapping, the more chance there is that a corruption could occur over time.  Fragmented file systems can also slow down a computer and contribute to corruption, so defragmenting is recommended.  Both defragmentation and file system checking/correcting are done in Windows XP by going to my compute, right clicking on the C: or other local drive, selecting Properties, Tools and choosing either check now or defragment now.  I normally run defragment a few times to maximize defragmentation.  On the check file system option, choose automatically fix file system errors.  Do not choose the scan and correct disk errors option unless you have eliminated every other potential cauase.  This option will check the read/write capability of every physical sector of the disk and will take hours to complete.

I hope this helps.  Good luck to you.