Quicken 2014 & 2015 display slowness

[RocketJSquirrel]

Quicken 2014 & 2015 display slowly on my Dell XPS laptop. At program startup, the Quicken window flickers, flashes, and jumps around before finally settling down. Resizing Quicken windows lags badly, with the window frame taking seconds to catch up with the mouse.

My understanding is that for QW2014, Intuit moved from a really old version of Microsoft .NET (like version 2) to a newer version (I think 4). This screwed up Quicken really badly, with all sorts of issues surfacing in addition to display slowness. (E.g., CTRL keys stop working, focus gets lost, etc.)

Not every user sees all the symptoms. Apparently, most users don't see the flickering & flashing that I see. More users see repaint slowness and focus issues.

The Quicken Community has no answer for why this has been happening for the past 2 years of Quicken versions. I wonder if anyone here on the Win7 forum might have a clue.

Hopefully, my hardware configuration will show when you click on it. My Dell has 2 graphics processors, and they both exhibit the same problem with Quicken.

 

[carwiz]

Click on the Start Orb and type dxdiag. In the search result list, click on dxdiag.exe.

After it runs (green bar disappears), click on Save Information at the bottom of the window. Save the text file to a convenient location then upload the file here.

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. I hope some sip from this fire hose provides a clue.

 

[carwiz]

You might start by updating your drivers.

Driver Version: 8.15.10.2455
DDI Version: 10.1
Driver Model: WDDM 1.1
Driver Attributes: Final Retail
Driver Date/Size: 7/19/2011 15:39:54, 8310272 bytes

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

That got my hopes up. Both Win7 Device Manager and the Dell site told me I had the latest (2011) Intel graphics driver. So I went to Intel and found a 2015 driver. Full of optimism, I installed it, and got no improvement in Quicken's display behavior. Old and new driver versions shown in attachments.

Remember the other contributors to this mystery: (1) Quicken post-2013 is the only program which has this problem, and (2) the same problem appears when forcing Quicken to use the Nvidia GPU, which has much more recent drivers.

Also remember that a good deal of Quicken's code is 15 years old or more. I'm certain Quicken bypasses layers of newer Windows APIs which Quicken predates.

I'm open to the idea that this could still be a driver issue, but which drivers other than graphics/video could be at play here?

 

[carwiz]

There was no shortage of drivers in the DX list. Perhaps there's others that are interfering.

Use this tutorial on Clean Start/Boot on both the Services and Startup tab. If there are QB startups/services, leave those but uncheck all the rest except your antivirus (AV). You should have nothing but QB and your AV for this test.

By the way, I'm still using QuickBooks Pro from 1998. I tried a newer version about 2010 and returned it. Too much overhead. There were things running even when QB wasn't. The PC just crawled with QB installed.

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

I'm using Quicken, not QuickBooks. I'm a Quicken whiz, "super user" on their site, alpha/beta tester, phone meeting participant (across 12.5 time zones), ad nauseam. I beta test every version, and I get all the versions for free, but my production machine is still running QW2013, thanks to these .NET4-related problems introduced with QW2014.

 

[scr]

Quicken 2014 & 2015 display slowly on my Dell XPS laptop. At program startup, the Quicken window flickers, flashes, and jumps around before finally settling down. Resizing Quicken windows lags badly, with the window frame taking seconds to catch up with the mouse.

My understanding is that for QW2014, Intuit moved from a really old version of Microsoft .NET (like version 2) to a newer version (I think 4). This screwed up Quicken really badly, with all sorts of issues surfacing in addition to display slowness. (E.g., CTRL keys stop working, focus gets lost, etc.)

Not every user sees all the symptoms. Apparently, most users don't see the flickering & flashing that I see. More users see repaint slowness and focus issues.

The Quicken Community has no answer for why this has been happening for the past 2 years of Quicken versions. I wonder if anyone here on the Win7 forum might have a clue.

Hopefully, my hardware configuration will show when you click on it. My Dell has 2 graphics processors, and they both exhibit the same problem with Quicken.

I'm running Quicken Deluxe 2015 on a new machine, noted in my system specs #2, with the same issues you describe. I also experienced these conditions on system #1 in my specs.

I've come to the conclusion that it's Quicken rather then my system.

In as much Quicken is the only game in town for this type of software and the only one my bank supports I have resolved to live with it.

If I could find something to replace it I'd start using it right now. It's unfortunate that MS Money went down as I preferred it over Quicken.

 

[carwiz]

Any feedback from the Clean Boot?

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

Not yet. I have to block out some time for that.

 

[RocketJSquirrel]

Any feedback from the Clean Boot?

OK, I got around to trying the Clean Boot. It had no effect on Quicken's flickery flashy startup. I even tried a "too-clean" boot and disabled Microsoft services as well as the 3rd party services. No joy there, either. But thanks for the eminently logical suggestion.

Any other thoughts? Someone elsewhere suggested that Quicken was improperly using hardware display acceleration, and that it would be better to disable that. But I don't know how to do that.