How to improve terrible performance on Windows after trying the usual tricks?

It might sound strange, but I have seen no direct correlation between "how powerful/fast" a machine is and how Quicken performs on it. In fact, I have seen more complaints from people with "powerful/cutting edge" computers than not. Maybe part of that is what they expect. After a certain speed Quicken just can't be speed up any more. The major factors are just memory (but these days all computers much more than what Quicken needs) and the speed of the drives can make a pretty good difference.

And looking at your video does seem to have a quite slow startup time. Note that one of the first things Quicken is going to do at startup is access the Internet. Real slow startup times (maybe even slower than what you have) might be an indication of network timeout issue. But whatever it is, the fact that a new data file didn't make much difference implies that there is something on the machine that "just doesn't play well with Quicken". For whatever reason, it seems like Quicken seems to hit these kinds of problems much more than any other program. For instance, some people have reported problems like this and then updated their video drivers and solved the problem.

As a reference for what to expect, the only time I see a wait cursor is entering investment transactions (see timings below). My startup time for my 172MB file is 15 1/2 seconds on this:

I do have a SMB drive in this where the limitation on speed would definitely be the CPU/bus. But as you can see this isn't a "powerful machine". I use it because it is totally silent, and I hate fans. And I just tried starting a second time, as that took about 9 seconds.

On my much more powerful computer with much faster it is about 8 seconds. I think one of the main reasons for the difference is the speed of the drive, but it could be a combination of a lot of things.

BTW Quicken makes very little use of multiple cores, so the single core speed as far as processing goes is the most important number.

Timings on "silent/small" computer:

Go from Home tab to main checking account: 2 seconds.

Go from checking account to investment account with the most transactions (not that much, but it is all I have to go by): 4 seconds

Manual investment transaction entry using Enter Transaction (time for dialog to come up, faster than I can time by myself doing both clicking and starting/stopping stopwatch), time to fully done after hitting Enter/Done. 3 1/2 seconds.

Go back to checking account: Can't time it, too fast. Same for entering transactions in the checking account.

Go back to that same investment account now that it has been opened and cached in memory: less than 2 seconds.

I could go do timings on my fast machine for the above, but I think you get the point that there isn't really much point.

I haven't used a "real GPU" in probably 15 or more years. When I talked about people with "powerful machines" one of the things they state is how big and powerful they GPU is. In my opinion this is totally wasted on Quicken, and depending on the driver can actually be many times worse.

Modern GUIs and especially Win32 applications don't really make use of the GPU's "power". The GPU "power" is mostly geared to image processing in parallel for games and videos (which can also be used for compute things like AI).

They aren't really geared to actually make standard GUIs any faster than what has been there of decades when talking about "static" things like menus and text and such. This is especially true since Windows 10 where they got rid of most of the "shading". When you see "delays" it isn't the graphic processing.

I don't do anything on my computers that really requires such GPUs and I have several reasons to favor the GPUs integrated into the CPU.

1. I hate fans, the more powerful the GPU the more likely you will need noisy fans.
2. The very fact that there is one and only one GPU type in that processor line means that its drivers are more likely to be well tested and "mature" instead of the "cutting edge" GPU drivers.
3. Less power.

Will the new machine you are getting perform better? Maybe. But I wouldn't stake any bets on it being better because it is "higher performance", more likely because the configuration is different.

One of the major advantages Apple has over Microsoft is that it controls the hardware and therefore can control things like this, whereas anyone can build a computer for Windows, which means there is untold amount of different possible configurations.

I wouldn't expect anything different than what is already being done. There is no way they are going to go and do a total rewrite. And at most I expect them only to update old GUI libraries/features on an "as needed basis".

And in someways you might not like what you are actually asking for.

I remember that there was this big survey done where the number one customer request was to "modernize the GUI". They took that to heart and changed, and then tons of people screamed that they hated it. Why? This was at a time where most users were using Windows 7 with all the nice 3d GUI components, but Windows 10 had just come out. So, of course Quicken Inc went to "flat" and people hated it.

Bring that up to today. I think if you ask the average Quicken customer if they love the new GUIs over what the old ones looked like and what features they had for customizing and such, I don't think you will get a lot of positive feedback for the newer GUIs.

And for performance problems I really think that it is a mix of really old code doing strange things, trying to push the code to do things it wasn't designed for (Sync to Mobile/Web for instance) and poorly designed/implement code in certain spots in the first place (investment registers).

Well, I can tell you one thing for sure. There aren't any developers here answering questions. So, all that can be offered is speculations. The "first step" to even have the possibility to talk directly to the developers would be contacting Quicken Support, and then it would still require getting them to escalate the problem.

https://www.quicken.com/support#contact-support

BTW on the startup problem would be interesting to see if disabling the network would improve it. But given that you are having "general" performance problems throughout the program, I wouldn't really bet on it being a network problem.

I will also note that on the "hundreds of posts of people complaining about similar issues" the big problem with just searching for "performance problems" and getting hits on here is that you have no way to quantify them into the different possible problems. For instance, you have people where the startup is fine, but in a given investment account entering transactions is slow. That is a completely different problem than what you are facing.

And I can tell you more times or not when I have looked for problems in programs it turns out not to be what I thought was initially. And your idea of running a debug version is a very good idea as in real data instead of speculation. But the problem is one of resources Quicken Inc is a company of about 200 people and the actual developer are much smaller than that, and in comparison they have very large customer base and can't dedicate a lot of resources/time on a given problem when "hundreds/divided by the actual problem you are having" is small in comparison to hundreds of thousands or more customers.

The 1-line register problem has always been a mystery to me since I use it almost exclusively and don't see any performance difference and no disk access for mouse movements. Again, it seems to me that some people have a certain combination graphics/mouse or something that triggers this.

I will also say that whenever I look at Quicken's disk accesses they look trivial to me. As far as I can tell Quicken reads in all the data for a given account when you open that register, and so any "writes" are tiny out to their database.

Example of what I see when switching an investment account that I haven't opened during this session.

I am a long time (since 1999) Qwin user. I'm not very technical and I don't do thing with Quicken except track my bank accounts and investment accounts. I do use a lot of the usual categories and a few custom ones.

Anyway, my experience was getting slower and slower. I recently archived all of my investment accounts. It sure made a noticeable, positive difference in the overall response of the application and particularly in the online update.

I never really thought much about this, but now that you mention it, if you are doing One Step Updates that include investment accounts that have performance problems because of the amount of securities/security lots/transactions, it makes sense that would also slow down the processing of new transactions into those accounts.

This has been my experience, that "new powerful" computers bring very little to the table to speed up Quicken. The biggest speed ups I have ever experienced with Quicken was a long time ago when all the computers got a lot more memory, and a bit more recent (but still long time ago) switched from a hard drive to a SSD (and bit more when I switched to a real fast M2 SSD). But we are talking seconds in startup and switching between accounts kinds of performance speed ups.