Steve Collison

A friend of mine owns a convenience store, and like many other convenience store owners he uses QuickBooks Point Of Sale to manage his transactions.

Lately he encountered a problem with QuickBooks freezing intermittently and sometimes reporting an error as follows:

The connection to Point of Sale company data “%s” has been lost. The Server Workstation is down or there

As is often the case with computer problems, reproducing this error seemed difficult at best. Luckily, it was only a matter of time before I encountered the error as I frequently look after the store for him when he has other things he needs to do.

Today I came in right in the middle of the intermittent bug. I noticed a couple things:

1. The pause experienced between transactions is not random, but instead a particular length which suggests it is actually a time out.
2. The credit card system was timing out (as visible by the message on screen). If I restarted the machine it’d start working again, even with the other problems persisting.

Knowing that a time out will only happen if the network connection is active, I disconnected the PC from the router. Instantly, QuickBooks was behaving itself, as though someone had just started the engine of a car you were pushing.

To skip the big mess in the middle, we eventually concluded that the modem was bad. If the modem was nudged it’d shut off completely – an intermittent piece of hardware causing an intermittent problem with software. Not far fetched, but probably not an obvious problem if your hardware isn’t clearly intermittent.

What I’d recommend to anyone experiencing this problem is this:

1. Check all your network cables to make sure they’re in good condition.
2. If you have a separate router and modem, try disconnecting the router completely and connecting the computer directly through the modem.
3. If possible, try a completely different set of hardware. IE: a friend’s router and modem.

Intuit have not documented any real solutions to this problem, so I really hope this post helps someone out. Don’t forget to leave a comment if this helped you.

My aunt had been having some trouble recently wiht her DELL Mini 9. These are well designed little laptops, but they don’t have an optical drive. When they go wrong, you’re left paddling upstream through the blue waters of death – if you opted for Windows. If you opted for Ubuntu, you’re even more screwed, because finding an image to restore the Mini 9 is next to impossible. Usually, DELL are very good about making software & drivers available, but not this time!

Installing a plain copy of Ubuntu is a bad idea, as the DELL copy is optimised for the hardware it is installed on.

Luckily, I managed to find a copy of the DELL Ubuntu image and successfully copy it to a USB key. To find out how, read this article: Restore UBUNTU to your DELL MINI 9