[Carolyn (OP)]

I have Quickbooks on my desktop pc, which is the one I generally use for work. 

My Dad is having heart surgery tomorrow, so I'm leaving town very shortly, but I have a boatload of accounting work to do and not enough time to do it before I leave.

My desktop pc uses Windows XP.

I want to back all of my accounting crap up on an external hard drive and work on it on my laptop while I'm away.

If I install Quickbooks on my laptop which uses Vista can I transfer all of my files back and forth between the two computers?  I desperately need to balance my corporate checking account today or tomorrow and it will be very helpful if hubby calls me and needs me to send invoices out.

Is there any way this will work?

[Mark Paquette]

You should be able to simply create a Quickbooks backup from your desktop PC on to the external hard drive.  Then, with Quickbooks installed on your Vista laptop, plug the external drive in to the laptop, start quickbooks, and choose "restore backup" (or something to that effect).

This is probably the way Quickbooks would recommend.  However, I usually just copy my Quickbooks file on to a USB stick (assuming the file is smaller than my USB stick), and then copy from USB stick to another PC, then simply open that file in Quickbooks.  I haven't had any problems using this quicker approach.
The file that I copy ends with the ".qbw" extension.  For example, "Acme Rocket.qbw" would be the entire Quickbooks file for Acme Rocket Company.

Try it first for a test run.

Hope this helps...

Mark

[Carolyn (OP)]

Thanks Mark.  I'll give it a try tomorrow.