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First off... our registers run Windows XP. XP overall is not a bad operating system at all, it's leaps and bounds ahead of everything Microsoft had ever put out at the time.
That said... every now and then our registers start running kind of sluggish - not horribly slow, but enough that there's about a half second delay between scanning an item and it showing up on the screen. A reboot always fixes this. Today I was scanning an order, not really looking at the screen much. I scanned an item, heard BOOP, scanned another, heard BOOP, scanned another and... nothing. Looked down at my screen, and the screen had never shown the previous item. I started hitting a few keys, and... nothing. The clock on the customer display was still ticking away, and it showed the last item I'd scanned. But nothing would respond except for a beep every time I pressed a key.
Okay, I've had this happen before. Hands off the keyboard and in a minute or so it'll jump back to life, 99% of the time the server hiccuped while looking up a PLU/SKU.
5 minutes later I'm calling my boss over and saying we need to reboot it, and re-ring the order. Then my cash drawer pops open and a receipt prints up saying they'd paid exact cash just as I'm reaching down to power it off. WTF?
One MAJOR problem with our menu driven registers. If you try to switch menus when they're slow, they act like every keypress is intended for that menu. I had hit total when it started running slow to see if the menu would change to the total menu. It didn't, so I hit the QTY button to change qty.... (and if you're on the total menu, that acts as the cash button). My boss and I collectively hit every menu button there is trying to get it to respond, and nothing happened. See where I'm going with this?
This is the second time this has happened somewhat. The first time I waited several minutes, supervisor came over and gave up with messing with it, and I just turned the PC off. It booted back up fine. This time just as I was about to shut it off, it suddenly decided to snort a line of speed through the fan vents and respond to everything.
On the next transaction, the quantity button failed entirely. If you hit it, it would say "KEYED VOID INVLD, KEYFLICK NEEDED" then lock up until a supervisor came over with a key. We wound up rebooting it and it's been fine since then.
THANKFULLY, we have a way to fix it when an order gets cashed out. It basically involves ringing the total amount of the previous order into a specific department, finalizing THAT order, then management doing a refund for the amount of the previous order in that specific department. Pain in the ass, but it works. Once an order is finalized we can't modify it, ever. So even though my register's zombie cashed out a $62 order, my drawer balanced to the penny at the end of my shift.
That said... every now and then our registers start running kind of sluggish - not horribly slow, but enough that there's about a half second delay between scanning an item and it showing up on the screen. A reboot always fixes this. Today I was scanning an order, not really looking at the screen much. I scanned an item, heard BOOP, scanned another, heard BOOP, scanned another and... nothing. Looked down at my screen, and the screen had never shown the previous item. I started hitting a few keys, and... nothing. The clock on the customer display was still ticking away, and it showed the last item I'd scanned. But nothing would respond except for a beep every time I pressed a key.
Okay, I've had this happen before. Hands off the keyboard and in a minute or so it'll jump back to life, 99% of the time the server hiccuped while looking up a PLU/SKU.
5 minutes later I'm calling my boss over and saying we need to reboot it, and re-ring the order. Then my cash drawer pops open and a receipt prints up saying they'd paid exact cash just as I'm reaching down to power it off. WTF?
One MAJOR problem with our menu driven registers. If you try to switch menus when they're slow, they act like every keypress is intended for that menu. I had hit total when it started running slow to see if the menu would change to the total menu. It didn't, so I hit the QTY button to change qty.... (and if you're on the total menu, that acts as the cash button). My boss and I collectively hit every menu button there is trying to get it to respond, and nothing happened. See where I'm going with this?
This is the second time this has happened somewhat. The first time I waited several minutes, supervisor came over and gave up with messing with it, and I just turned the PC off. It booted back up fine. This time just as I was about to shut it off, it suddenly decided to snort a line of speed through the fan vents and respond to everything.
On the next transaction, the quantity button failed entirely. If you hit it, it would say "KEYED VOID INVLD, KEYFLICK NEEDED" then lock up until a supervisor came over with a key. We wound up rebooting it and it's been fine since then.
THANKFULLY, we have a way to fix it when an order gets cashed out. It basically involves ringing the total amount of the previous order into a specific department, finalizing THAT order, then management doing a refund for the amount of the previous order in that specific department. Pain in the ass, but it works. Once an order is finalized we can't modify it, ever. So even though my register's zombie cashed out a $62 order, my drawer balanced to the penny at the end of my shift.