Quicken Starter Edition on Windows 10 running slow and not responding

BLayden

I am running the current version of Quicken Starter Edition on Windows 10 and in the past week it has started running very slow and even says not responding. It is taking me over 30 minutes just to reconcile my account. Every time I click on a check or deposit there is a little blue wheel that just spins and it says it is off line. I have activity from 2006 (53386 transactions) in my file. Is there anyway to delete old activity with out have to delete one item at a time?

Quicken Anja

Hello @BLayden,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your question.

You can select and delete multiple transactions at once by selecting the first transaction you wish to delete, then hold Shift on your keyboard, and select the last transaction you wish to delete. Doing so will select all the transactions in between the first and last transaction selected which you can then right-click the highlighted transactions and select Delete.

However, please keep in mind that this will change your account balance for which you will likely need to add an adjustment or adjust the opening balance yourself.

Alternatively, if you wish to simply shrink your data file without making extra adjustments, please follow the steps below.

1. Navigate to the File menu
2. Select File Operations
3. Copy...
4. Enter the desired date range you wish to move forward with and click OK
   
5. Wait for the copy procedure to complete
   
6. Select New Copy and click OK                                                                              

I hope this helps!

BLayden

Thank you for the information. Just to be clear the new file will contain the current information I want to use or the the old information I want to shrink? For example I have information from 2006. So I want to keep 2016 to current date that is the date range I use?

Quicken Anja

BLayden said:

Thank you for the information. Just to be clear the new file will contain the current information I want to use or the the old information I want to shrink? For example I have information from 2006. So I want to keep 2016 to current date that is the date range I use?

Yes, when creating the copied file, the date range you select is the date range that will be copied over into the new file. Anything outside of that date range will be left out of the copied file but will remain in the original file.

I hope this clarifies things for you!

BLayden

Thank you so much for your help.
Have a great day.

Quicken Anja

Absolutely! You're welcome, glad I could help.

BLayden

Good morning. You helped me last month with my Quicken running slowly, it was working fine until Monday 4-20-21. It is taking a long time to load my file again. It says I have 53550 transactions. Should that be less since I did the file shrink per the steps above? I only use Quicken like a check book. I don't download any information from my bank account nor do I write any checks. I do import a QIF file each week, which I did the import yesterday with no trouble. I have Quicken Mobile & Web sync off. Also last time I had this issue was told to logout of the Quicken ID and Cloud Accounts. When I went into preferences it made me log back in to the Quicken ID & Cloud Accounts. Do you have any suggestions?

Greg_the_Geek

What is the full path to the folder that contains your Quicken data file on the hard drive? Are you using OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Backup? Also, have you restarted (not shutdown) your computer lately?

BLayden

My file is on our server. I do not use OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Backup. Yes I have restarted my computer several times in the last few days.

Greg_the_Geek

I would suggest moving your data file to a local hard drive since Quicken doesn't support networked drives.

BLayden

I have been using this version of Quicken since 2012 and this is the second time I have had this issue in the last 2 months. Moving it to a local hard drive will not work. We do not keep any thing on our local hard drives because the server gets backed up every night and our local hard drives do not. I did the steps above on March 31st to shrink my file because at that time I had 53386 transactions (from 2006 to March 31 2021). Today I noticed that number is larger because of the activity from March 31 to today. Also the file size is of my data file on March 31 was 51508KB and toady it is 51757KB. What does shrinking the old information do? Shouldn't both of those number be smaller?

Greg_the_Geek

You didn't shrink the file, you simply compacted it. My file is larger that yours and I don't have any slowness.



I would suggest moving to a local hard drive as a test. You can also set Quicken to make a backup every time you exit Quicken and use the network drive as the backup location.