Optimize Quicken to work better with more computer configurations [Edited]

spalt

Whenever I do a long running action in Quicken — download transactions, accept transactions, etc — Quicken completely HOSES my computer. Quicken becomes unresponsive, Chrome becomes unresponsive, can't start apps, can't kill apps, I can see PerfWatson.exe spin up, which usually means Windows is detecting a process that’s hanging the message loop or pegging a single CPU core. It feels like Quicken is locking something at a system level (maybe heavy disk I/O on the data file or a thread deadlock) and Windows just gets dragged along for the ride.

It's been behaving this way for 10+ years across multiple different computers, so I am pretty sure it won't be fixed any time soon. Today I downloaded and accepted 100+ transactions and I basically had to just get up and do something else for an hour.

Please fix, thx.

Bob Stanis

Amen to this suggestion. Quicken for Windows is the only software I have that can totally brick a computer for a period of time. Other software freezes, but doesn't take the entire system down.

UKR

@spalt ,

where is your Quicken data file located?
Is it located in the correct folder location, C:\Users\_your_username_\Documents\Quicken\
or is it located elsewhere?

Poor performance can be a result of, for example, MS OneDrive interfering with Quicken while it's performing disk I/O to the data file.
The same can occur when the data file is located on a networked drive or on an external USB storage device.
In these cases, data file damage may occur.

The general consensus is to move your Quicken data file to your C:\Users_your_username_\Documents\Quicken folder.
If you want MS OneDrive to have a copy of your data file, set up Quicken Backup processing to send Automatic Backups to a OneDrive folder every 1 time you close Quicken.

Chris_QPW

It would be nice if they took the time to find out where the bottlenecks are and worked on them. But I doubt they will do it.

I do wonder what resource Quicken can tie up that would cause the whole computer to freeze. It might be like @UKR suggests and is OneDrive.

Quicken pegging one core isn't surprising though. Quicken is an old program and was never designed for multiple cores, so at its heart it is still pretty much a single core program. As such when it goes into any process that is going be continuous work, it is going to try to use 100% of that core.