Maximum transactions in Quicken

Hi, Tom.

We've heard many dire warnings of limits on Quicken file sizes, but I don't recall that they've been expressed in numbers of transactions. And the file size warnings have never been verified. They seem to come mostly from Quicken Tech Support and some of us suspect that they are just looking for an excuse when they can't (or won't) fix a customer's problem.

I've been using Quicken since 1991; my .qdf file is over 30 MB and the full fileset is over 36 MB. I have no idea how many transactions are in there.

What are the statistics on your fileset?

Q2001? Sounds like you are driving a Classic! ;^}

RC

Are you using 2009? I am having a hard time keeping 2009 running and my qdf is about half the size of yours. I have been thinking that maybe it was the size of my file, but evidently not.

Hello RC, since I updated to 2009, my 48.8 MB 2001 file has become 66.8 MB in 2009 version. Quickfill is like a snail. Even if I turn quickfill off, I am still on the clock for 5-10 seconds every time I tab to the payee field. I do not understand that. I created a dummy file, with no data, and it works fine, so the performance issue has to be a function of my data file.

Best Regards, Tom Sestak

Hi, Tom.

You haven't yet told us about your computer: Windows version, including hardware (64-bit? speed? hard drives? RAM?); operating system (WinXP SP3? Vista Ultimate x64 SP2?); network? How does it behave with other software? Sometimes, make and model of your hardware tells us what we need to know; other times, the specs are more informative, especially if you built or modified the computer yourself. All these can impact the speed and capacity of Quicken on your machine.

Until we know those things, we'll just be making wild guesses.

That's a good test and observation. Have you Validated your Quicken file? Recently? Have Quicken make a copy and then Validate the copy. (File | File operations | Copy, and then File | File operations | Validate) The Validation should take less than 10 minutes, even with that large database. If there are errors in the copy, and Validate says it corrected them, then see if running the Copy is better than the original. If Validate detects no errors, then we'll have to try something else. But many users report that simply running the Copy is a big improvement because much of the deadwood in the original file is not Copied, so the Index in the Copy works better and faster. Might even get rid of some of the bloat added by conversion to the Q2009 file format.

RC

Hello RC, it's a two year old computer, everything else works fine. Just have had problems with speed since upgrading from 2001. It's a Pentium 4

3.06 MHz, 2 GB RAM, and XP operating system.

I'm still on Q2002 - last version they produced for the UK. Does the job, and whilst I keep checking out the competition nothing's quite there yet (including Quicken themselves - Mac version of Quicken is both awful and non-international, Quicken Financial Life appears to be shaping up to be....both awful and non-international. Hmm.).

Cheers, Ian

[Base: Quicken Deluxe 2009 R6 on Vista Ultimate 32-bit, dual core CPU, with about 50MB Qkn fileset]

TS, In addition to paying attention to RC's always excellent advice, it is always good to clean out payee lists from time to time. Tedious, but it pays off in speed. Qkn memorizes not just a payee, but a transaction (payee, category), so when you deal with a mega-retailer and excpenses fall in different categories, you will have the payee appearing as many times as "different" transactions have been memorized.

That's my 2 cents' worth (Euro 0.015 for the traveling OP in another thread)

Al