I Want 64-bit Quicken for Windows

Mr Toole to You

Quicken Home, Business & Rental Property version R30.14 is installed on my PC running Windows 10, 64-bit. According to Task Manager, this version of Quicken is 32-bit software. How do I get a 64-bit version, if there is one?

bmciance

Sorry, there is no 64 bit version of Quicken.

Quicken Hugh

@Mr Toole to You, 
The R30.14 is the current, up-to-date version of Quicken for Windows. 

bmciance

Sorry, there is no 64 bit version of Quicken.

Quicken Hugh

@Mr Toole to You, 
The R30.14 is the current, up-to-date version of Quicken for Windows. 

Mr Toole to You

I'm sorry to hear that there is no 64-bit version. I hope that shortcoming will be addressed soon.

Chris_QPW

Mr Toole to You said:

I'm sorry to hear that there is no 64-bit version. I hope that shortcoming will be addressed soon.

Not likely.  First off there isn't any real benefit to it.  The main benefit for a program to go to 64-bit is to allow it to use more memory.  Quicken uses way less than the 2GB that it can already get with 32-bit.  Second off because 32-bit would still have to be supported they would have to put out both a 32-bit and a 64-bit version, which would split more of the development time for "not really important work".

ssalava

I wonder how many years it took Quicken to move from 16-bit to 32-bit back in the 90s? ;-)

bmciance

ssalava said:

I wonder how many years it took Quicken to move from 16-bit to 32-bit back in the 90s? ;-)

It was a much smaller and less complicated piece of software back then.  

Chris_QPW

Actually speaking from personal experience I would expect the conversion from 16-bit to 32-bit was far harder than going from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Why?

Because of very fact that it was done once and then Microsoft and developers learned their lesson.

In the "old days" it was very common to store pointers in int variables and also counting on an integer being a of a certain size.  Well when you change the underline "bits" pointer size and variable types change.  But once that was done and back between 16-bits and 32-bits they learned this causes all kinds of problems and started making sure that they used "pointer variables" and didn't count on variable size as much.

So in fact going from 32-bits to 64-bits tends to be easier.

But in fact that isn't the point.  Whenever you do something like this you want to weigh costs, possible problems, and benefits.

Costs of course aren't zero, this is a major change even if most of it can be done changing some of the headers/compiler settings and such.

Possible problems.  If a developer way back when did play "games" and changing to 64-bit will make a difference, there is a high chance that you won't detect this until it just goes wrong somewhere.  Quicken Inc isn't going to be the only one feeling that kind of pain.

Another problem is the fact that you have just caused yourself double work for the foreseeable future.  Just because most people are using 64-bit operating systems that doesn't mean all of them are.  A 32-bit program can run on a 64-bit operating system, but a 64-bit program can't run on a 32-bit operating system.  So now you have build both, have installs for both, and when problems come up you have to have a way to know which was used and maybe have to troubleshoot them separately.

All of that for the "perceived" benefits of "64-bits".  The main benefit of going to 64-bits is being able to access more memory.  And Quicken doesn't even use the max that it can get in 32-bit.

Rocket J Squirrel

Do Help > About Quicken and click Acknowledgements and scroll through them. I will bet anyone a donut there is at least one old 3rd party 32-bit library in use which has been abandoned and not updated to 64 bits.

Chris_QPW

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Do Help > About Quicken and click Acknowledgements and scroll through them. I will bet anyone a donut there is at least one old 3rd party 32-bit library in use which has been abandoned and not updated to 64 bits.

Very good point!  That had slipped my mind.  I would bet that the Quicken database engine is 32-bit and that long ago is "unsupported".

That means for Quicken Inc to go to 64-bit they would have to pretty much rewrite all of the database stuff and maybe more.

That basically "seals the deal" there isn't any way Quicken Inc can make Quicken 64-bit.

tsteven3

Although, I would love for whoever owns Quicken to develop a 64 bit version, it would cost too much money for them to do it. They aren't willing to spend it now. The only way that I can conceive of that happening is for Microsoft to drop support for ALL 32 bit applications. If that happened, I bet Quicken would go to a web based version very quickly. It would almost be like starting from scratch. It's not the developers that run Quicken, it's the bean counters, they control it.

There really aren't a lot of substitutes for Quicken out there. Before I was using Quicken, I was using MS Money, and I thought it was great! Also, I don't really relish learning a new app.

Chris_QPW

I learned something interesting while looking if Quicken Windows would run under Parallels on the Mac with the new M1 processor.  It seems that Windows 32-bit programs will run like that, but not Windows 64-bit programs.  Yet another advantage for staying with 32-bit.