Review by the bear

I feel it is important for reviewers to outline the operating system, and other important information as it is difficult to know when people have problems what their configuration is. I am running windows XP, service pack 2, and have installed all the MS security updates.

I will avoid repeating what others have said other than the conversion went basically flawless. That is why i gave a rating of 5 stars. I have a Dell laptop that i initially updated to Qucken premier 2010 to make sure there were no problems and made backup CD’s and then restored them to the laptop before converting my desktop to 2010. All went well with the backup and restore to the laptop. I have a desktop dell machine that is 5 years old that I mainly run quicken on, the laptop is my backup pc.

All went well with the upgrade with no problems that i can see both on the laptop and desktop. I checked my account totals, reports, and they all matched up with what I had on quicken 2007. Keep in mind that I also agree that year to year changes are minor and did not upgrade to 2010 until the last minute as my quicken 2007 support will end next month (no more online updates). The on line account download for my visa account also went well along will all the other online accounts (about 6). All the accounts updated without any problems.

When restoring from a backup of 2010 that i made on my laptop to the desktop dell, I did find some confusing issues. I had a difficult time getting the quicken file (only one now with 2010) from my backup CD to the quicken directory on the desktop. The program asks you where you want the file restored to. I said the qucken directory. When i selected that directory a bunch of old qdf files popped up to select from but not the most current 2010 file I had on the backup CD that I backed up from quicken 2010 was not listed.

I use quicken mainly for updating by checking account and visa accounts and do not use a lot of the other functionality of the program, so i maybe use only 10% of the program functionality.

I will provide an update if I run into any significant problems but so far it has been perfect. I had no reason to upgrade other than the 3 year sunset rule quicken has for support which really means the online download will not work anymore if you do not upgrade.

After an hour or so I do no see any significant changes from Premier 2007 in 3 years other than some things have been shifted around and there are some new information screens. I would not upgrade unless your 3 year time period is running out.

I would also recommend testing the upgrade on a similar pc is you use more than one PC before you delete your old version of quicken.

Save your money and wait as long as you can before upgrading and when you do upgrade to a new version wait at least 9 months for the bugs to get fixed.

UPDATE: It has been a couple of weeks now since installing Quicken and all is going well with no major issues. I have found that the Live Community Help is outstanding. Type in a question and it usually has been answered. Their search feature is very good as your question brings up very relevant answers to your problems. I use Quicken 95% of the time for managing my Visa and bank accounts and doing budget reports. Everything has worked almost flawlessly including reconciling bank accounts, backups and transaction downloads and reports.

There were a couple of quirky things that I needed help on: 1) Future bills would not show up in my register; 2) Preferences would not stay saved after restarting Quicken; 3) Quicken would not start on my bank account. All the problems were solved through live community as people already found the answer for them. I just needed to use classic view and change a couple of preference settings.

There is one quirky problem. When you backup the backup file name is limited to 31 characters. When i rename the backupfile the some of the preferences revert back to the default values after I get the file name too long error message. I like to have my checking account show up as the home page. With 2010 you need to use the classic view. The backup issued caused my home page to go to the quicken default. Also my billminder is shown on my accounts as a prefence and goes away also. It takes a few minutes to restore the preferences that were lost once you know what to do.