Problem running Quicken Home and Business on Parallels

Scott Wheeler
Scott Wheeler Quicken Windows Subscription Member

I use Quicken Home and Business for my small business. Quicken seems to run slow on my Mac in Parallels but mostly tolerable. My issue is when entering data into a new customer invoice it is painfully slow - each character typed takes 3-4 seconds to register and God forbid I mistype something I have to start over.

The only apps I have installed are Quicken and an older version of Quickbooks, which I use but only to store customer information that can't be stored in Quicken.

I had this same problem on an earlier iMac 2013 with 32gb ram. At the time I did two things and was able to solve the issue. 1) Exit coherence mode in Parallels - this made a noticeable difference. 2) Change ram allocated to Parallels from 4gb to 8gb. This solved the issue completely.

I upgraded my iMac a couple of years ago to a 2020 and did a fresh install of everything including Parallels and Quicken and sadly the same issue has returned and this time it is worse. I did not bother using coherence due to the previous issue with Quicken. I had 4gb of ram allocated to Parallels and again upped it to 8gb. I did notice a slight improvement but the issue persists.

I have an older pc I just use for shipping and decided to see if there was any difference on the Windows machine and could not replicate the problem. Quicken seems to run fine for me outside of Parallels however running a separate pc just for Quicken isn't an option.

I thought about adding more ram to Parallels to see if that made a difference but 8gb is the max for standard Parallels. The pro version will let you allocate more ram but is more expensive and I will likely have to add ram to my iMac to avoid MacOS being affected. System requirements for Quicken are way below what I'm using. Hoping someone has some suggestions to solve this. Thank you.

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