Help with upgrade path

LMAnderson

Hi folks. I have been using Q99 since it was new, but it's on an XP machine and I want to move off that to something newer. I have a Win 8.1 machine available, and maybe I'll upgrade it to Win 10. I do not want to move all the way up to the SAS model of Q, and I don't need most of the online functions. There's only one that I think would be handy -- the ability to update securities prices. So I am basically trying to reach a place of relative stability on an operating system that won't go out of support in a couple years. That might mean getting to a version of Q that is local but runs on Win 10, or perhaps a version of Q that runs well on WINE in Linux.

I happen to have a CD with Q2008 Premier, which I've never installed. It is labelled for XP and Vista; I am hoping it would work on Win 8.1. So I started my experiment.

I read the guidance about having to go through Q04 to convert to later versions. I downloaded and installed Q04 on the Win 8.1 machine. I imported a backup from Q99. It looks generally ok, except that it lost price history for some funds / stocks. Is there a workaround? How long does Q keep price history anyway? I noticed even with Q99 that it's no longer possible to see, say, where things stood at the end of 2003 or something.

I still have more checking to do to make sure everything got imported correctly. Some people here have discussed problems with split transactions that involved transfers, but I checked a few of those, and it looked like they came in correctly.

I am not happy with the screen layout in Q04. It has a wide top bar with a bunch of buttons/icons most of which I will never use; a list of accounts along the left side, and a window beneath the register for downloading and scheduled transactions. I'm used to an almost full-screen register in Q99, but in Q04 the register is only about 1/4 of the Q window by default. After futzing with it, I found I could improve it to about 2/3, but it is still less than I'd like. Am I missing some way to customize the screen layout? This has me wondering if there is a screen shot of Q08 available -- is it still all cluttered up?

Grateful for any help, and interested in your comments. Thanks!

splasher

I haven't looked at QW2008 details in a long time, but look at pop-up registers to increase your register size.

As far as stock price history, even in subscription, the most history you can get Quicken to recreate is 5 years.

About the UI, it is drastically different now then what it looked like in even QW2008, so be prepared for even more visual shock.