Friends of mine have a business, they asked me to help with this issue.
They have one “shipping” pc and they want to use it to print labels to a thermal printer from UPS & Fedex.
Sounds simple, right?

No.
They are using the web versions of each company to ship, not local software.
Both UPS & Fedex require IE11 (Firefox or chrome are only tried when everything else fails, and I detest Chrome)
JAVA is also involved and when I get UPS working, Fedex breaks and when I get Fedex working, UPS breaks.
Of course, both companies want you to use them exclusively, so tech support is really only gonna help me make THEIR printer work.

Add to this, they (the friends) bought some big box store, cheapest they could find, HeapingPile PC that has so much of HP’s bloat-,trial, &-support software on it that it barely runs.

Ugh. Any suggestions? I worked on it last night until they closed up, and Fedex was having web issues on top of that....

I'm not an expert, but instead of switching back and forth between UPS and FedEx software, you might want to look at an option like ShipStation

https://www.shipstation.com/

That is what I'm using, and data is pushed directly from the online point of sale system to ShipStation and we print from there.

This might not work for you, but it's what I'm using. We can ship out via UPS, FedEx, and USPS.

Thanks! I’ll look into that.

As a stop gap, I may see about setting one up in IE, and the other in Firefox. I’m going back there this AM.

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
Thanks! I’ll look into that.

As a stop gap, I may see about setting one up in IE, and the other in Firefox. I’m going back there this AM.

Yeah - doing the different browser route might be a good solution.

If general performance is an issue, why not wipe the system and do a fresh OS install?

What thermal printer are they using?

Define "breaks" please. Is there an error message, etc?

quote:

Originally posted by gspdude:
If general performance is an issue, why not wipe the system and do a fresh OS install?

What thermal printer are they using?

Define "breaks" please. Is there an error message, etc?

I agree with wanting to know what "breaks" means but to wipe the OS is not a competent answer to your solution.

Back when I did more shipping, I used FedEx software. It was free to download. Local program on my computer, not a web app. I don't know whether they still offer it. It did give me two discounts: one for linking it to QuickBooks, and one for American Express. I seem to remember that each of those discounts was 5%, so with both it was 10%.

Be sure to check whether the destination is a residence or a business address. Both FedEx and UPS charge more to deliver to a residence, less to deliver to a business. They don't state the reason, but I'll bet that it's because it's much more likely that a business will have somebody to accept delivery; residences don't always have somebody home. They don't make it real obvious when you prepare a shipment, but look for the residence / business option, it will be there someplace.

Sorry, I should’ve included more detail...
UPS prints the label with the wrong format
Fedex just won’t lrint at all. It just goes into oblivion.

And of course, now IE is crashing left and right.
No good deed goes unpunished, eh?

Got it.
Manually removed java (what a crap piece of software) and reinstalled.
For now everything works. I made sure I had a witness and printed several labels from each website.
I’m still gonna mention that shipping station website to them.