How to improve terrible performance on Windows after trying the usual tricks?
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I’m going to take a look at Moneydance.
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I was able to get my IT department to whitelist both the Quicken executables and data directory from Cortex, which is the only AV solution installed. Performance is perhaps a tad better but still disappointing. Deleting a single transaction, for example, takes 5-7 seconds.
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Here's what I'm seeing when doing nothing in Quicken—highest CPU use of any application, and power usage is "very high". This is with all other desktop applications closed and the Quicken executables plus data dir whitelisted in Cortex. In this particular screenshot, the application was temporarily not responding.
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I came across to 2 fixes to performance problems under Investments. The test: put your vertical scroll slider at the bottom of the scroll track. Next hover the cursor over the track just below the UP arrow (NOT on the up arrow) at the top of the scroll track, click and hold the slider and measure how long it takes for the slider at the bottom to climb to the top where your cursor is. On 3 of my Win10 boxes it took 2 minutes 45 sec. to scroll all the way up to the year 2000 at the top. Next I went into Preferences/Investments and changed the Investment Register Preferences under List Display from "Two Line" to "One Line" On all 3 computers the scrolling speed dropped to 45 seconds. The next thing I did was archive my main investment account which had the greatest slowdown. The archiving function only archives "Settled" transactions and creates a file of all these transactions and then provides a transfer of cash entry that carries over to the investment account you have been working on. Now I repeated the vertical scrolling test and the time dropped remarkedly to just 5 sec. with one line display and 10 seconds with two line display. I'll leave a link to Quicken's directions. One more thing. I mentioned I have three Windows 10 computers which all responded similarly to these adjustments. I also have a two year old low spec. "student" laptop with an Intel Celeron 1.4 GHz processor with Win11. No adjustments were made to this laptop and running the original file with the slow performance gave me a budget laptop that ran circles around the non-tweaked 8-12 year old Win10 machines. What's that about? I don't know but maybe the newer machine had certain improvements in cpu instructions or elsewhere that caused the huge performance difference. Here's the link I mentioned:
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Just to clarify — these steps only impact performance when viewing investment accounts, so aren't likely to help my problems with regular (savings/checking/credit card) accounts?
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Next I went into Preferences/Investments and changed the Investment Register Preferences under List Display from "Two Line" to "One Line" On all 3 computers the scrolling speed dropped to 45 seconds.
Um, only half as many lines to scroll?
Quicken user since version 2 for DOS, now using QWin Biz & Personal Subscription (US) on Win10 Pro.
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This is an interesting observation. I'm afraid I'm a terrible use case for this kind of testing. The most transactions I have in an investment account is about 2,700. When I do this test, no matter if I have one or two line mode set, for the most part the scroll bar tracks with my cursor (just a couple of lines behind it).
I don't know what is going on, on your machine, here is what it looks like on my machine (the low power one):
Clearly your machine and Quicken don't get along!
And that actually is what I was referring to before. People tend to believe that the "power of their machine" will greatly affect the Quicken performance, and I have never seen that to be the case. For whatever reason, Quicken tends to find any video driver problem or other driver conflicts or such (that actually isn't confirm that is a guess on my part, and based on some people reporting that they updated video drivers it got better).
Clearly if all the CPU is being consumed, they the performance is going to be terrible. But finding what is causing that isn't going to be the "normal tweaks". Most likely there is something very low level that is going on.
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I was reminded by another thread, that if the CPU usage is really high like yours doing a "Clean Uninstall/install" where you uninstall, remove all Quicken's config directories like C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Quicken and C:\ProgramData\Quicken and reinstall, can sometimes fix the problem. So, if you haven't done this, you might try it. The basic idea here is that either a config file or program file has got corrupted and needs to be replaced.
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This is helpful — I followed these steps and now Quicken does seem faster. It's still quite slow by modern app standards, but more like the regular slowness I've experienced in recent years, rather than the dramatic slowness of the past few weeks.
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