Com Port for new Receipt printer

How can I get my QuickBooks POS 11/12 Lite to recognise another com port other than 4?

I have a new Posiflex PP8800 receipt printer which will work with QuickBooks on com 4 but the drivers cause a PCI memory fail and won't work after shutdown and restart. The computer is happy when it allocates com 3 to the virtual com port and will print a test page from my Windows 7 environment but this does not show as an option for selecting in my version of POS. My QBPOS options are Printer port on Customer Display or Com 4 only. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers and all the other USB drivers last and first and all other options don't work either.

Comments

Nicki Hall

Hi all, I feel a bit sheepish but I've just solved my own problem! In my defence, I have been tearing out my hair for four days. Here is the solution in case it helps others.

The printer's driver that was supplied was not the driver that works with quickbooks. A secondary driver was supplied by the sales support from Posiflex that tells the printer to use a virtual USB port but behaves as a com port instead. As my QBPOS was only showing me the option of choosing com 4, this is what I selected. It worked until I shutdown the computer and restarted the next day. Com 4 then caused a PCI memory fail. After attempting many orders of reinstalling drivers and shutting down and restarting without any success, the following worked.

Uninstall all drivers. Unplug all devices. Shut down and restart. Make sure QBPOS is closed (mine is set to open on startup so I had to close it on restart).

Plug in the printer and turn it on. Tell windows to install the virtual com port driver file (mine found it automatically as I had previously saved it in a computer folder.

Open Printers and Devices. If you see two icons for the printer, one under printers and one under other devices or unspecified, remove or delete the icon under printers (This is your windows printers and QBPOS doesn't use the windows print drivers).

Make sure the icon has a com port specified. My computer automatically assigned Com 3. Open Device Manager and expand the LPT and COM drivers section. If your printer is there without an exclamation mark, you're all good. An exclamation mark means something is wrong with the driver or it has not loaded. (Separate issue, make sure you chose the right driver for your operating system and hardware.)

Open QBPOS. Under the options tab choose receipt printer. I had previously created a new printer name PP8800. Under the printer option I chose PP8800 and "connected to" com 3 is now visible. As soon as I selected that happy little printer communication noises occurred. Windows is now happy too since it got to dictate the com port number.

Plug back in all your other devices so they can now load drivers.

A combination of errors was causing things not to work. Make sure QBPOS is closed and open it after the drivers are loaded and after the windows printer drivers are deleted. This was causing other com ports not to be visible in QBPOS!

Nicki Hall

Thanks for your prompt reply but as you can see, I finally nutted it out. My computer just decided it didn't like the new printer with com4 even though my previous posiflex printer was using it. The virtual com driver was not available on the Posiflex website. The Sales guy from the business I purchased the printer from was kind enough to contact them and they emailed a rar file in the guise of a pdf which I had to extract with an unzipper. Just telling you so anyone else can find the solution. The new PP8800 thermal receipt printer has superseded the PP7000 which was an option in the QBPOS drop down menu. Nicki

All is working fine now and you can probably include the PP8800 on your "it works" list....after you get Posiflex to supply the virtual com driver on their website!