drawing the line

performance is the size of the Price History (.QPH) file.

You may want to rename the file and evaluate the response. If it has no effect, you can simply rename the old file back after deleting the empty .QPH file quicken will substitute for the missing file.

First reconcile all your accounts up to date. Then do a "Year-End" copy and have the app delete everything prior to 01/01/2004. Everything that has reconciled will be deleted, and all you will have only these two years. This should do it.

Good Luck.

Certain transactiobns (such as Investment transactions) needed to provide basis information will NOT be deleted.

I'd never recommend that - the data loss is irreversible.

On Tue 22 Nov 2005 01:25:01p, Mike wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

There is no data loss, so the word irreversible doesn't apply here.

My apologies. Let me rephrase my response. The loss of the data for historic comparisons with current data is irreversible. You can not merge the two files without having to overcome serious obstacles.

Better?

The above is the key point in your query; you need to preserve historical investment transactions.

QW offers options that either preserve all historical investment transactions or you can truncate at a particular date.

If you elect to preserve investment transactions, then all you can trim are reconciled cash-flow account transactions.

If you elect to not preserve historical investment transactions then you lose the cost basis info for those old securities you still hold - not a good choice.

I have experimented with some of these options in a test file. QW handles trimming cash flow accounts very well - it inserts a new beginning balance such that your current balance is preserved. It does not do this for investment accounts - the current balances of the trimmed investment accounts can be wildy different - it will simply be the cumulative sum of the remainingg transactions.

Bottom line - for your needs, I would not consider these options desireable.

I have nearly 15 yrs worth of data in my file and have been tempted to trim it down. However, have resisted the temptation as I do not want to give up the ability to review past history, do comparisons, etc. As someone has already pointed out, the trimming operation is virtually an irreversible step; akin to "putting Humpty-Dumpty together again".

Finally, the subject of file size vs performance is a much discussed and much debated topic. My read of all of it is that there is no definite correlation.

Hi, Steve.

We can't really evaluate your situation because "so big" doesn't tell us the size of your file. :>( You also didn't mention your Windows version or your hardware configuration. Our answer might be different for a PIII with

20 GB HD running Win98, versus an AMD 64 with 300 GB HD running WinXP Pro SP2. Win9x/ME used a memory-management system that caused some problems for Quicken.

But this topic comes up here quite often. Then we old-timers post how long we've used Quicken (15 years for me) and the size of our current QDATA.* fileset (mine total over 29 MB now) and assure the poster that the size of the database is no hindrance to Quicken. Other posters mentioned the .qph file; mine is nearly 3 MB. (My computer is an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ with 1 GB RAM and lots of HD space running WinXP Pro SP2.) Quicken seems even faster for me now than in earlier versions - MUCH faster than in Win9x days, of course! No matter how many other programs are running at the same time.

As the others said, you NEED quick and easy access to cost/basis information on any property (stocks, other investments, your home...) that you still hold and may sell in the future. In my experience, it's much easier to work around a lot of stale data than it is to find old-but-still-relevant data when you need it some day. Also, I find it very comforting to know that my check registers are at my fingertips and I can quickly and easily look up when I bought my old TV set back in the 1990s - and where and what I paid for it.

If you will check the archives of this newsgroup, you will find many discussions of this subject. The consensus, I'm confident, is that a large (however defined) current fileset with your entire history instantly accessible is much preferred to many small filesets with only a year or so in each one. We don't have to find, open and look into the 1996 file; nope, not there, how about 1995?; nope, maybe 1997 or 1998...?

Of course, if your Windows is out of date or your hardware is limited, then the answer might be different in your case. It also might explain the "slowness" of Quicken for you.

RC

I'm another long time Quicken user. I started in them mid-80's on a

7.15 MHz real PC. I experimented with trimming out superfluous info in my records but that was more work than it was worth. And, I really need transactions with dates and values for home improvements, etc.

As time went on, PC technology improved and the size of Quicken's files has never been a problem because I buy a new computer every 3 or 4 years. The big file is up to 17+ GB. Note: I back up to a flash drive everytime I exit Quicken.