Customer Reviews

Quicken 2004 Deluxe [Old Version]

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(22)
1 star:		(120)

 

 

I have been using Quicken for 13 years. Although I was unhappy with the Quicken 2003 (to which I had upgraded from Quicken 2000) largely because of the crowding of the register to the point where it could not be read easily at least THAT version functioned. The new Quicken 2004 upgrade is FULL OF BUGS. Hidden accounts randomly reappear and there is no way to get rid of them. Popups advertising Intuit products interrupt one's work constantly and cannot be removed. The stock market quotes' download does not function at all. Intuit's technical support has been moved to India and Intuit has failed to inform and train that staff about the bugs. They have not issued patches or revised software. [They're still "working on it", three months after discovery of the bugs in August.] I lost 13 years of data in five separate databases and despite three backups, could not retrieve it because the backups were corrupted by the new buggy software. Intuit's President's office at Intuit has been nasty and unsympathetic. The best advice I have is: DON'T buy this product at this time. It's very dangerous to your database(s).

I have used Quicken for many years. I also use Quickbooks. So, I am a pretty sophisticated user. I won't quibble about the Quicken interface. My real issue is that I use the program mainly for tracking investments, including stock options (puts and calls). After all these years, I have many defined securities including many, many options. Suddenly, the program will not let me add a new security; to do so I must rename an old security with the security edit feature. Quicken online support won't answer even the question of whether or not there is a limit on the number of securities that you can have -- they refer you to the $1.95 per minute support service. Also, the program was touted as importing option prices. It doesn't. As an attempt to "patch" the security name problem which I suspect is an undocumented limit on the number allowed (with a step that may or may not work, but will apparently cost me the ability to track financial history), I tried to use the "new year" feature to try to cut down the file size. But the program refuses to copy my file or make the conversion. I am now going to try Microsoft Money to see if that will work. I am generally anti-Microsoft, so this move pains me, but Quicken apparently no longer serves my needs.

As a long time Quicken user who upgraded from 2001 to 2004, I cannot believe what has happened to the program and the support for Quicken. I must agree that there are many bugs and I have lost and have had corrupted all of my investment and personal financial information. I have been online with little success from people who don't really understand. They apparently are using scripted responses. My spouse is a CPA and we have used Quicken for many years. We have now tried using Microsoft Money 2003, but the reports are poor and it is challenging to use in some areas. I suggest using older versions of Quicken. If I could only easily reenter all of my information to Quicken 2001!!
Intuit did similar tricks with Turbo Tax last year. I agree with previous reviewers about their "forced" use of online services. I would be interested to hear from knowledgeable software people to see if they add cookies etc. to our computers as they did with Turbo Tax 2002. Good Luck

After using Quicken for the past 11 years, I can say through experience that this is the worst product they've ever released. I have used this version for 2 days, and I've reported 5 bugs, and at least 2 of them are critical. I've posted the following on various newsgroups:

Income/Expense graphs show internal transfers as actual income and expense, in spite of checking the "Exclude Internal Transfers" option. This renders the reporting options effectively unusable. 2003 worked fine, broken in 2004. Net Worth graph on home page can not show more than 12 months. If it does, program crashes on startup and corrupts data file. Rate change on a closed loan causes program crash. Backup option always prompts for overwrite, even if you have checked the "Do not show this next time" option. Version 2004 causes cursor stuttering or response lag while typing within the application.

My advice, as an experienced and knowledgeable longtime Quicken user, wait at least 6 months for bug fixes, and even then, be skeptical. I am VERY disappointed that Intuit would let such a weak product slip out the door like this. I plan to mail my copy back to Intuit for a full refund. For anyone else who learns the hard way like I did, the Intuit address for refunding your purchase within 60 days is:
Intuit, Inc.
Returns Department
6060 Nancy Ridge Drive
Suite 100
San Diego, CA 92121-3290

This is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever purchased! New features have in recent versions have been minimal with even major bugs not being fixed. I installed this version and was not able to import my previous data, nor run with the sample data for more than a few minutes without a GP. I called tech support but they wanted to charge for support and they have no online support. I've since returned the software.

Like many reviewers here, I wish there were a NEGATIVE
rating star for total junk like this. Also like many
reviewers here, I am a longtime Quicken user, since the DOS
days. Please do NOT purchase Quicken 2004!!! Aside from the
forced-upgrade thing, this new version has a klunky interface,
numerous bugs (like wrong balances after data conversion),
and all the "special offer" messages suggest Quicken 2004
contains more spyware than a recent Outlook virus. I have
un-installed and am now evaluating both GNUcash and Money.

I repeat: DO NOT BUY QUICKEN 2004 !!!!

What a huge mistake to upgrade...I've been using Quicken for 12 years, (just upgraded from Quicken '98) and this version is a shameless leap backward. Everything is less elegant, and there is Quicken marketing taking up screen space at every turn. All the bugs have made online stock price updates completely out of the question, and worse, Quicken has acted surprised that people are disappointed!! Now that I've had it for several weeks, I'm stuck because any entries made since the so-called upgrade can't be restored into an older version.
Do yourself a favor and just stick with whatever version you're using. There is nothing here that you need, and take it from all of those of us writing...RUN WHILE YOU CAN!! IT'S NOT TOO LATE FOR YOU TO SAVE YOURSELF!!

Quicken 2004 users who have used managed their finances with Quicken for a long time will have to agree that Intuit seems to keep complicating the process with each new release.

I've been a Quicken user since 1991, so it pains me a great deal to give this product such a lousy review. I either agree with or am ignorant about most of the previous reviewers' complaints, but I have some to add of my own, most of them regarding the "Reports" features.

First, for some silly reason, the Quicken 2004 programmers have decided to include account transfers in the income and expense categories. This means that a transfer of, say, $500 from your checking to your savings accounts will add $500 to both your income and your expenses for the period. This "feature" - fault, more like - can be turned off, but apparently you have to turn it off every single time you create a new report. Perhaps in a CPA's world this is a technically precise way of looking at things - perhaps - but that's why I'm an engineer and not a CPA - I don't want to deal with such silly stuff. I want to know how much I actually made and spent, not some strange number that includes real expenses and transfers between accounts.

Another annoying feature is that once you hide an account, Quicken excludes past transactions on that account from reports. For instance, when I ran an income/expense report for 2003, I noticed that most of my credit card interest was missing. I paid off the card last year and then cancelled it. Since I don't have it anymore, I "hid" the account, so as not to have it cluttering up current accounts. But Quicken apparently thinks that all the interest I paid on that "hidden account" is irrelevant. Not to me, it ain't. And the reports aren't aven showing the interest I'm paying on my student loans (an active account). Where that interest has disappeared to I haven't the faintest idea.

Yet another nuisance is that when you first open a report, the program defaults to showing you transactions for the entire time that you have information in the register. That means that if you have transactions dating all the way back to 1995, it'll show them. I think that most people would prefer it to automatically default to the last or current month, but nothing doing...

It's nice that Intuit sees the need to keep adding features to this program over the years. However, the more features it adds, the more and more cluttered the whole program becomes, the more and more difficult it becomes for those of us who just want an accurate view or our finances to have the faintest idea of what's going on.

I am not sure if Microsoft Money is any better (I strongly suspect it isn't), but Intuit should know that the more difficult and buggy its flagship product becomes, the more and more tempted I am to wanna find out. People can forgive a lot of things, but when a company makes your finances so hard to comprehend, that one is hard to forget.

I upgraded from Quicken Deluxe 2001 on a one-year-old Dell laptop running Win XP Professional. All of my data, from 1996, and settings were converted with no problems, including existing saved reports. The program appears to run about as fast as the 2001 version on my laptop.

The only reason I upgraded is that Quicken will stop supporting account downloads for my 2001 version this year, and I was able to get a copy of this 2004 version from a seller on Amazon for about $10. Compared to 2001 there is nothing new in this version that I need, and some elements (like the budget) are harder to use or require more mouse clicks to find and use. The bottom line is that Quicken is requiring an unnecessary upgrade to a good product just to make more money. This is a sleazy practice. If they had allowed me to continue using 2001 for account downloads by paying a reasonable fee (like Norton Antivirus) I would have paid it and kept using 2001.

Note that Quicken tells you in its letters and on its website, when indicating you need to upgrade in order to continue downloading account information, that you need to upgrade to the latest version (2005). That is not true. Upgrading to an older version (2004 in this case) costs much less and allows you to continue downloading for a few more years. Also, by buying an older version you get the latest "fixes" the first time you download data, which should correct most of the bugs that other users have complained about.

I have been a very happy Quicken Home and Office user since 1997. I upgraded to 2004 H&O because I also went from Win 98 to XP and thought a new release would likely work better. WRONG! After trouble migrating my old data and having some balances get scewed up (still can't find the missing transactions, I then downloaded the R3 patch. Things seemed to be looking up. Last night I created and printed some invoices, shut down normally and today, I started the program to find that it hangs at startup. After several COMPLETE and THOROUGH uninstall/reinstalls to different drives, and checking and defragging my drives with Norton, running Norton AV, the program WILL NOT open ANY of my backups from the last three months. No QDATA files produced by 2004 can be opened by a clean version of 2004. It is as if every backup I ever made with 2004 is now corrupted. And I am using copies of the originals -- so there is no way the software corrupted the originals.

I spent nearly all day on the phone with tech support (now they are in New Delhi, India) and there is NO resolution thus far. the best thing I can do is VALIDATE and SUPERVALIDATE and that ERASES three months worth of transactions from the file -- literally reduces the file size by 1.2 meg -- no matter which file I use as input to the process. I have backups that are a day old, a week old a month old, two months old -- a CLEAN install will not read any of them and validate deletes three months worth of transactions from the file before it becomes readable. THIS IS A NIGHTMARE!

DO NOT UPGRADE to the VERSION. YOU WILL REGRET IT. SERIOUSLY.

I run two businesses off of Quicken and I am HOSED.