Posted: May 23rd, 2011 | Author: Joe | Filed under: Reviews | Tags: Quicken, Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »
Intuit, the makers of TurboTax, have released this year’s version of their popular personal finance software: Quicken.
Here’s a review of Quicken Deluxe 2011, available in stores and download from Amazon
.
The many flavors of Quicken.
I’ve been a fairly heavy user of Quicken for about 6 years now. I’ve only ever used the Deluxe version, though the product comes in many different flavors (Deluxe, Premier, Home & Business, Essentials and now there’s even a Rental Property Manager!). I’ve only ever used the Deluxe version and when I was researching the 2011 version I discovered that the majority of people who buy Quicken buy the Deluxe version anyway. Some 85+% of shoppers buy Quicken Deluxe. So, that made it easy to review since my product choice also happens to be the choice of most shoppers.
But if your situation is more specialized (i.e. you have rental property or a home business) then you may want to investigate the other flavors that Intuit has to offer.
As for the Deluxe version, here’s what it features:
- Money management and budgeting tools that enable you to track your spending and increase your savings.
- Save time categorizing your spending with auto-categorization.
- Download your financial data and manage all your accounts together in one place.
- Helps you stay on top of bills and create a budget.
2011 vs 2010.
What’s new.
One of the nicest features of Quicken since I’ve been using it has been the ability to download your account transactions online – right from the Quicken program itself. They call it “One-Click Update” and if your financial institutes allows for it (i.e. they’ve partnered with Quicken) then you get your transactions automatically downloaded to the correct account in Quicken – retirements accounts, bank accounts, credit card activity, auto loans and more.
This has at times been a draw back for me if my financial institution was small and not partnered with Intuit. With the 2011 version, Quicken Deluxe now automatically downloads transactions from over 12,000 banks, brokerages and other financial institutions–including PayPal.
The “guided setup” wizard has also been revamped, in an attempt to make learning to use the features of Quicken a bit easier too.
Intuit has also worked to increase the integration between Quicken and their other popular product: TurboTax Your financial information in Quicken can be imported into Turbo Tax, making tax time preparation a bit less painful. This ability has been around for a few years now, and I haven’t tried it myself yet. My taxes just haven’t been that complicated to begin with, though I think I may be giving it a try next year.
Perhaps due to pressure from online competitors, Intuit has made Quicken 2011 more “socialable” by integrating Quicken Live Community, an online forum for advice and interaction with other quicken users. This new community forum is integrated seamlessly into the program itself (you can view the online community from right inside Quicken).
Quicken 2011 does a better job of categorizing your spending automatically, and it’s much quicker for situations where you need to enter the category yourself. Often times, simply typing the first few letters of the category is enough to accurately select the proper category. This alone can be a major time saver.
They’ve done a nice job redesigning the cash flow feature, improving the graphing and making it easier to project your future savings or shortfalls.
The layout of the program has been redesigned in an attempt to make commonly used features easier to access. This will likely be helpful for most people, but may be annoying if your most commonly used features don’t match what “most people” commonly use.
They claim that transaction updates for account downloads are faster, though I didn’t see a noticeable difference. That could be dependent on your connection or your institution’s connection speed as well.
System requirements
Here are the system requirements to run Quicken Deluxe 2011:
Processor: 1 GHz
Operating System: Windows XP SP2+, Vista, Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit)
Memory: 1 GB
Hard Disk Space: Up to 450 MB free space; up to 1 GB if .NET not installed
Display: 1024×768 or higher resolution
CD-ROM Drive: Required
Internet: 56 Kbps (broadband recommended for online services)
Printer: Any printer compatible with Windows XP SP2 or later
Additional Software (included in Quicken installer): Microsoft .NET 2.0 or later;
Windows Installer 3.1;
Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
Why buy.
As I write this, you can buy Quicken Deluxe 2011
at Amazon for $39.99 (33% off!)
Good personal finance software can help you create a budget and stick to it. It can help you set goals and meet them. After all, if you don’t know where your money is going and you wonder why there isn’t much left of your paycheck at the month’s end, how can you save for the future?
Beside the basics, good personal finance software can help you find extra savings or eliminate expenses you forgot you had. It can help you manage your money more effectively and help to pay off debt quicker or save for the big things like retirement or a new home or a new car.
Is Quicken Deluxe the best personal finance program out there? That depends on how you use it and what you’re using it for.
I honestly can’t tell you how it stacks up against online sites like Mint because quite frankly the idea of putting all of my personally identifiable financial information out on the web frightens me a little. But I know millions of people don’t have a problem with it. That’s your call.
Also, I’ve been using Quicken for years now, and I don’t particularly like the idea of re-entering my information and starting over with a new product.
Bottom line: Quicken Deluxe is a great program if you are looking for personal finance software that is not web-based, or you’re looking to replace Microsoft Money.
Why not to buy.
So those are the reasons you may want to buy Quicken Deluxe. Here are some of the downsides (or why you might not want to buy it).
Intuit has made the unfortunate choice to include advertisements in their product for their partners as well as other Intuit products. Advertising for your other products is nothing new, but the way in which Intuit does this in their Quicken products can become tiresome, at best. It is possible to ignore the banner-ad style product placement for Quicken Loans, Free Credit Reports and the like but it’s frustrating to have to do so in a retail product.
If you’re a Quicken 2010 or even a Quicken 2009 user you may not want to upgrade just yet. Many of the improvements are relatively minor and may not be worth the full price of the 2011 version.
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Posted: January 26th, 2011 | Author: Joe | Filed under: Reviews, spending | Tags: Faster PC, My Faster PC, Review, Save money on software, Software, Tips | 10 Comments »
I don’t usually do software reviews, but software development is my day job and I know a lot of people are looking to save time and money by keeping their old PCs (or even newer PCs!) in top running condition. I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials for MyFasterPC.com and I was wondering if it was really worth the money, or even possibly an outright scam. So I tried it out, and here’s what I found…
The pitch.
The commercial is not the usual late-night infomercial types. In fact, you can watch one of their commercials here.. There are quite a number of fly-by-night operations just looking to sell you useless software, often for a subscription fee. This doesn’t appear to be one of those services. However, it also probably isn’t worth the money either. More on that later.
The claim of MyFasterPC is to remove unwanted spyware, malware and viruses and also de-clutter your PC by removing files that are no longer needed. They also offer some general maintenance and optimization features.
The program.
When you visit the website, you are prompted to “download now” to “get your free trial”. This sent a few yellow flags, if not red flags, up in my mind. “Free trial” usually means you’re going to get roped into some sort of subscription or at the very least a purchase after the trial expires.
After you download and install the trial application, you are greeted with this welcome message:
“Clean, optimize and speed up” my PC? Sounds great! Let’s go!
After clicking continue however, I was greeted with this seemingly friendly message to “help us find unwanted items”, but when I read further I saw it was a confirmation to send anonymous information to the website.
This is OK.
Many sites and products collect this kind of information, and as long as it truly is anonymous there is nothing wrong with it.
So what kind of information are they collecting?
According to the website, it’s the following:
- Installed applications
- Hard drive size
- Processor type
- Windows version
- Memory capacity
- Programs set to run at startup
- Browser add-ons
- Services
Having over a decade in the computer software industry working with the Windows operating system, I can tell you that every item in the list above is not only relevant but in some cases essential to optimizing and de-cluttering a Windows PC. However, it’s not essential that the information be collected – unless they are trying to improve future versions and they want to get an idea of what the majority of their customers have.
The result.
After selecting to Continue, the application ran for a few minutes then displayed this results window:
I should tell you that I ran this on a plain-Jane Windows XP test machine, with minimal programs installed. So why did it find so many issues if it was a clean installation?
Disk space.
Well, the short answer is that simply browsing an hour or so on the Internet can create enough temporary Internet files to account for the 182.48MB to clean entry, as would the download and install of the MyFasterPC.com application itself, since that was downloaded and run from the browser.
Optimizations.
Windows usually ships with the least common denominator of settings, meaning that certain settings are enabled or disabled simply because most PCs fit that configuration. This inevitably leads to a number of settings that could be turned on or off for any given Windows installation based on hardware and other factors that would result in better performance. Frankly, I’m surprised it only found 3 that could be optimized.
Registry issues.
Registry “issues” is a broad term. Many optimization programs count items that appear in a program’s “Recently Used” menu as unnecessary and hence are added to the “registry issues” bag. Other times it can be references to programs that no longer exist.
Disk defrag.
Lastly, disk defragmentation is almost always recommended by these kinds of programs, since most hard drive go without being defragged for ever. The problem with this is that Windows already has defrag software built into it.
This list of issues seemed reasonable, so I clicked “Repair Issues.” That’s when my suspicions were confirmed.
The upsell.
While the MyFasterPC trial software was able to repair a number of the issues, there were many more that required the upgrade.
This is pretty much what I expected when I set out on this test. I figured that it was either loosely disguised spyware masquerading as a repair and optimization program, or it would eventually lead to a heavy-handed upsell to the “full version.”
Just out of curiosity, I clicked the upgrade button and the program brought up the purchase page of their website. They seem to offer 3 options and the full version runs $29.95 (regularly $39.95).
Conclusion.
Cleaning and optimizing your PC is absolutely worth doing for most older machines, or machines that have had programs installed and uninstalled recently, but in my opinion MyFasterPC is not the answer. I don’t think there’s anything under-handed going on here, and MyFasterPC.com does not appear to be a scam. I’m just not sure it’s worth the money either. It seems to be a little light on delivering the goods for the price.
You can get similar programs for free (see below) or name-brand software that does more for about the same price – for example, Norton 360
Still, for some users who may not be computer savvy or want to be MyFasterPC may not be all that bad.
A cheaper alternative.
Being a father of 3 with a wife who is a stay at home mom, I’m always looking to cut costs where I can – and free is my kind of price point. 
Here are 3 Free alternatives to MyFasterPC.com that don’t take a degree in computer science to use:
CCleaner . This handy tool essentially does what MyFasterPC does in terms of de-cluttering and optimizing, but also provides greater control. It too removes Windows temp files, temporary Internet files, browser cookies, and much much more. It also finds and repairs registry errors.
Avast! antivirus . Avast is an excellent -and free! – antivirus program that will keep your PC free of spyware, malware and viruses, which sill lead to less need to repair your PC.
Comodo Firewall. A firewall program is as essential as an antivirus these days. Comodo is an excellent alternative to the premium applications offered by the big name vendors.
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Posted: June 17th, 2008 | Author: Joe | Filed under: spending, Tips | Tags: Saving Money, Software, Tips | 3 Comments »
When I started this blog, I developed a sort of split personality. In my real life I’m a software engineer and all around computer geek. But when I sit down to write, or read a financial book or magazine, the finance driven “me” comes out. I never really noticed how little these two me’s interconnect until I was trying to think of a post topic and realized I was staring one right in the face, so to speak. My word processor is entirely free- and portable. But more on that in a minute.
DISCLAIMER: I am entirely PC based and have little Mac experience, so please bear that in mind.
There are free software applications (A.K.A. freeware) that provide similar functionality to many high-priced versions in the stores. The ridiculous part is that in many cases, they’re just plain better than their high price counterparts. This is usually due to what we call “bloatware” in the biz. But that’s another blog.
Here’s a few freeware apps I’ve come to love:
1.) OpenOffice.
OpenOffice is an open source (read, “free”) alternative to Microsoft Office. This suite of applications can entirely replace MS Office because it provides most (if not all) of the functionality that the average user requires AND it is capable of reading and saving in the various Microsoft Office file formats.
OpenOffice is a full office suite and includes a word processor (called “Writer”) and a spreadsheet app, called “Calc.” It also has a power point rival and a simple database app called, simply enough, “Base.” Both Writer and Calc are virtual Word and Excel clones, so adopting them is fairly easy.
The best part is – it’s free! So you can save a couple hundred dollars right there. Download OpenOffice here.
2.) GIMP.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is freely distributed under the GNU open source license. It’s practically a Photoshop replacement. It provides the same concept and functionality of layers, filters and brushes that make Photoshop so powerful, and it handles just about every image file type out there. I wouldn’t recommend this for basic image editing, but when you’ve got a serious graphic editing task the GiMP can step up to the plate. Download GiMP here.
3.) 7-zip.
7-Zip is an excellent Winzip replacement. I know, Winzip was shareware and not that costly. And 95% of its users probably never bothered to register the damn thing. But now with 7-Zip you can compress and un-compress for free and without guilt.
It handles MANY compression file formats: arj, lzh, gz, cab, iso, rar, tar and zip to name just a few. The best part (too a geek like me anyway) is that 7-Zip has its own proprietary file compression format, “7z”. 7z can actually compress files smaller than the standard zip format. 7-Zip does all of this (and more) all without the annoying nag-ware screen to click past. Download 7-Zip here.
4.) Audacity.
This aptly named gem is an audio editor. Its functionality is on par with professional software like Cool Edit Pro. Audacity features multi track editing and recording as well as sound effect filters and the like. It supports editing of wav, mp3, and Ogg Vorbis formats. This one can also save you a couple hundred smackers if you’re into sound editing, but not quite professional. Download Audacity here.
5.) FileZilla.
From the makers of the ever popular Firefox web browser comes FileZilla. FileZilla is a full-featured FTP client (they also have an FTP server) and supports open connections, SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH FTP. It’s incredibly simple to use, supports drag-and drop and resume. Download FileZilla here.
6.) Jarte.
Jarte (pronounced ” jär · ‘tay”) is a lightweight, simple rich text editor. From the website:
“1. A free word processor based on the Microsoft WordPad word processing engine built into Windows.
2. A fast starting, easy to use word processor that expands well beyond the WordPad feature set.
3. A small, portable word processor whose documents are fully compatible with Word and WordPad.”
It is all of these and more. Jarte is my primary tool of choice for all my writing projects. I find it provides all the functionality I need most when I’m just getting my thought on “paper”. If I’m formatting my resume, I’ll use OpenOffice Writer, but for simple text formatting, spell check and multi tab interface – it’s Jarte. Download Jarte here.
7.) IrfanView.
IrfanView is a fast, compact and portable image viewer, and lightweight editor. It runs on virtually all versions of Windows still in use today ( 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista), and it’s FREE.
IrfanView handles a HUGE number of file types but the most common are:jpgs, bmps, gifs, multipage TIFF, animated GIF and ICO files. It also has the major editing functions of any decent image package: Cut, Crop, Resize, Sharpen, Blur, Flip, Rotate, Red eye reduction and a whole lot more! Download IrfanView here.
8.) Cobian Backup.
Cobian Backup. Cobian. The name is a mystery. The website is hideous. The software is exceptional!
This small, powerful program handles full, differential, and incremental backups. It uses file compression and offers encryption. You can also backup to an FTP if local or network drives aren’t what you need. There’s all sorts of bells and whistles here, like scheduling and running the backup as an automatic background service and sending notification emails upon completion, but what I love about it is its simplicity. It has a very straight forward UI and fast and effective. Like the website, the icons need a good graphic designer, but that’s a small downside to a app as good as this with a price tag of zippo. Download Cobian backup here.
9.) Avast! Antivirus.
There are actually quite a few very good Antivirus programs out there, but my favorite is Avast!. It’s free for personal use and covers basic run-time scanning as well as scheduled system scan, IM/chat, email, network and website scanning. It has all the bells and whistle of premium Antivirus programs like virus vault, file cleaning and removal, automatic updates and more. I’ve tried AntiVir, AVG and Avast!. Avast is my favorite, though AVG is a close 2nd. Download Avast! Antivirus here.
10.) KeePass Password Safe.
Modern life has many wonderful and convenient improvements over the days of yore, but many of these technological perks come at a price. Identity theft is a huge problem. There are many causes, but one is that passwords are cumbersome. It’s an age old dilemma in the IT field: users should have secure passwords, but they often can’t remember them so they end up either using something less secure (like their pet’s name) or writing down the secure password on a post-it, thus making it less secure.
That’s where KeePass comes in. It’s a password safe, that allows you to store all your password info (encrypted and password protected, of course) and organize it by category. The benefit is that you only have to remember 1 secure password to open the program. After that, you can see what the password was for your ING savings account that you force yourself to keep away from lest you spend what’s there. Download KeePass Safe here
Oh, and every application in this list is portable (except Cobian, and Avast!). That means you can “install” (copy) it on a thumb drive and take it with you where ever you roam. Pretty sweet, eh?
You can find more FREE and portable software at http://portableapps.com/ and http://portablefreeware.com. It’s definitely worth a visit to see the wonders that abound out there in the open source community.
Photo, Free software badges, © marcomolinari.it
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