Dave McComb's Blog

These are two useful Windows commands that I use frequently:

1. shutdown -r -t 1
   When you use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to a Windows XP or windows Vista PC, the reboot option is not available on that PC. Well, often times you need to reboot the PC, so using the command above will do that.  The “-r” option tells the PC to reboot and the “-t 1” tells it to reboot in 1 second rather than the default 30 seconds. No reason to wait around, right? Running shutdown /? will give you a list of ll the options available.
2. net statistics server
   Running this command on a Windows XP or Server 2000/2003 machine will give you a number of statistics, but I most often use it to determine how long a machine has been running since its last reboot. (Like the uptime command on Linux.)  This does not work in Vista but if you run the task manager, you can see the uptime in the Performance tab under “System.”

As I said, these are two that I use frequently and that may be helpful for you too.

All of a sudden, Quickbooks 2009 would no longer email invoices.  It started failing with the error “Quickbooks cannot connect to the remote server because part of your company data is currently in use.” In addition, I could not print to a printer nor could I even open the “Printer setup…” menu.

I found this tech article about the problem and proceeded to follow the steps to make the PDF converter compatible with 64-bit versions of Windows.  I rebooted my PC and when I re-opened Quickbooks, I could get into the “Printer Setup…” menu.  However, I got the error, “You cannot print directly to the QuickBooks PDF Converter. Try using QuickBooks Save as PDF menu option.”

I was about to go look this up, when I checked the printer setup options again and restarted QuickBooks. When I restarted, everything worked fine. I’m not sure what that was, but it seems to be working fine now.

Hope this helps.