Relative Speeds of Versions

It got much better in, I think, '04 - fastest it had ever been, after occasionally taking 30 seconds to enter a transaction. I haven't seen it significantly change speed through '07, and I've got some pretty hefty files going back 10 years.

Jay Levitt

I just upgraded to 07 and noticed that during the upgrade it converted over

100K items. I've got 10 years of data and I've found quicken to be slower and slower each year.

Especially startup, entering transactions and drilling down on security detail (over 30 seconds on a 2+Ghz cpu). It flails the disk for an incredible amount of time so I suspect that quicken is inefficient on database access if the database is large (my .QDF file is 21MB).

Is there anyway to archive old data and get the database size down or known tips for speeding things up?

Note: I also keep finances for another family member (QDF files is 800KB) and everything from a performance perspective on this same system is instantaneous.

Thanks,

Jim

I'm running Q07 with QDF file of 15MB file and I'm not having any speed problems. I suggest you try doing a disk defrag if you haven't already tried it.

Same here. Quicken 2007P, 11 years worth of data, 22MB+ qdf file, and Q2007 opens faster than any previous release!

But yes, there is a way to archive historical data. Check Help.

You can archive data in Quicken, but archiving does not split off old transactions. See

. You want to do a year end copy to divide your data file. Details on how to do it here: In my experience, some folks have huge Quicken data files and have no issues with Quicken slowing down, while others swear Quicken is running slower with a larger data file. I personally do a year end copy to split off data so my data file only goes back 2 or 3 years. I simply have no need for data past that time frame for my personal finance needs.

As for the speed of Quicken 2007, it seems to run just as fast (or slow, depends > I just upgraded to 07 and noticed that during the upgrade it converted over

Other things to consider in addition to processor speed and hard disk fragmentation are (1) sufficient *free* disk space for hard drive swapping, and most importantly, (2) sufficient RAM. If Quicken and/or other apps are causing your computer to constantly access the hard disk, then either running fewer apps simultaneously and/or adding more RAM will be a big help. The more RAM your system has, the less disk swapping your computer will have to do, and the faster your OS and apps will run. If you're running low on hard disk space, there may not be sufficient space to properly defrag, and if your available space is really low, there won't be enough room to swap to the hard disk, slowing things down even further. For Windows XP, IMNSHO, you need at least

512MB RAM, preferably 1GB. Necessary hard disk space depends on how many apps you have installed and how much data you have.

I partition my main hard disk into C and D partitions, with C containing the OS and apps, and D containing all data. I prefer, however, to use separate hard drives, but now HDs are so large that it's a waste of space for me to put C and D on separate drives. (For now, anyway.) I like to have my C partition total size = twice the size of actual data stored, so if I have, say, 7GBs of OS and apps, I like the C partition to be ~14GB in size (wouldn't hurt to be 20GB IMO). Same goes for data (D), you should have plenty of free space. If you really want to get fancy, you can move the Windows page file to a separate hard disk, and that will speed things up, too.

As I've said many times before, I upgrade QP every year (am currently running) 2007, and Quicken is plenty fast for me. The only time it really takes is starting up and showing the flash screen. But most, if not all, apps take some time to start up and copy themselves into RAM.

Regards,

Margaret