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51 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Intuit Stumbles on Quicken 2004, February 9, 2004
By A Customer
A major player in the personal finance software arena for years, Intuit and Quicken has helped thousands keep track of their personal finances. I have been a Quicken user since the early days (Quicken 1 and 2), have upgraded to new releases over the years and have always been very satisfied with the Quicken product.Quicken 2004 Premier changed all that. The release of Quicken 2004 was advertised as allowing you to get instant answers to questions like "Are my investments outperforming the market?" and "What is my return for the past 1,3 and 5 years?" Unfortunately, after upgrading from Quicken 2003 to Quicken 2004 Premier, the question I was asking most was "What happened to my data?" Quicken 2004 has corrupted my personal finance information on four separate occasions (I know, "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me" ... I don't want to even think about "fool me four times..."). My financial books include four checking accounts, several credit card accounts, some loans, several investment accounts, and a smattering of other accounts. No account type is immune to corruption. In my checking accounts, one major problem is that Quicken 2004 insists on making up numbers (really, really, BIG numbers, like as big as your computer can handle), creating transactions with random dates to go along with the made-up numbers, and then inserting these transactions in the register. At one time my calculated net worth was too large to display (I wish ...); another time I owed more than the United States GDP. On another occasion Quicken 2004 erased all of the transactions from one checking account, strangely keeping a balance that looked to be about right. In another account, I have been overdrawn once due to a Quicken 2004 error. In the investment accounts Quicken 2004 decided to change the ticker symbols of some stocks in the investment accounts to unknown symbols on more than one occasion. It's not clear when this happened; it may have been during the updating process when prices are downloaded into Quicken. This caused trouble not only in evaluating the portfolio, but the reconciliations of the accounts were very challenging, because I was never sure if the difference was due to my error, or if Quicken had changed a symbol in one of the dividend re-investment transactions (which it did on two occasions). A few of the shortcut keys that Quicken power users have grown accustomed to, no longer work in Quicken 2004 (hitting the space bar to select a check during reconciliation, for example). These are known errors and "will be fixed in the next release". At least that's what I was told when I discovered the issue in Release 1. It has not been fixed as of Release 5. I was given the above information on one of my several attempts to get help by calling customer service. I was helped by "Jennifer", although I suspect her name was really Neeraja, or Srividya or something similar. Customer service appears to consist of very bored people, who are very far away, reading answers in OK English off of scripts to solve problems you did not call with. I was told once to reload Windows (I did not). Most of the time, I was told to run the File/File Operation/Validate option within Quicken 2004 (I did several times). I don't remember ever having to run that option on earlier versions of Quicken; I'm not sure it even was an option with Quicken 2003. On another occasion, I was questioned quite closely about the type of printer I had. Apparently, printers have become notorious corruptors of data in Quicken 2004. So, who knew? (I'm joking -- they're not). In no case, did the call to customer support solve my immediate problem. Sending in questions via email was better in the sense that I did not receive any wrong or useless information. In fact, I received no information at all. All emails went unanswered. Bug reports are never acknowledged, but they never have been. Running Quicken 2004 requires some serious horsepower. Intuit will tell you Quicken 2004 can run on a Pentium 200 or higher machine with 32 MB RAM and 75MB hard drive space. I originally installed Quicken 2004 on a spare Pentium 233 MHZ machine with 100MB hard drive. Big mistake. When I fired up the software, the lights in the house didn't exactly dim, but I bet they wanted to. Quicken 2004 is unbearably slow on machines below the recommended 300MHZ limit, and I wouldn't put it on anything less than 700Mhz. Quicken 2004 seems to be doing a lot of disk I/O and window rendering and all of that thrashing around costs performance points. My copy of Quicken is now installed on a Dell Dimension 4600, 2.79GHz, 512RAM, 111GB free hard drive, Windows XP Professional. As you might expect, speed is no problem. On the plus side, Quicken has done a nice job with the charts and reports. So, even if the numbers are wrong, they look marvelous. The screen gets real busy, though, what with the Menu Bar, the icon bar, the Quicken Home side window, the main register window, the transaction window and the maddening Inuit advertisements (`Try Turbo Tax - the #1 tax solution year after year") at the bottom, all showing up at once. Intuit will tell you that Quicken 2004 works with a Super VGA (800 x 600). It will, but the recommended 1024 x 768 with 16 bit color monitors will make your life more pleasant. Again, the numbers might be wrong, but at least you'll have a shot at seeing them. So, what's a body to do? Well, I'm digging through my files looking for my copy of Quicken 2003. I'll revert back to that. It worked fine, no funny stuff, had almost all of the features of Quicken 2004 and it was stable. In the meantime, I'll keep watching Intuit to see if they fix the new version, and begin to understand what customer service is all about.
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