I received a letter this past week telling me that Intuit would be implementing their sunset policy for Q2003dlx on April 25, 2006. They included a $20 off certificate that could be used online to purchase the deluxe version for $40 compared to $60 at their website. Not satisfied that this was the best deal I checked at Amazon and their price was $53. So I tried eBay and found several people selling Quicken at a substantial discount. I picked up a copy of Q2006 Premier for $23.90 shipped to my door. It is an original CD-ROM (not a CDR) with an Intuit hologram near the center hole shipped in a sleeve with no box.

I spent some time Saturday deleting old files and removing programs I no longer need. Then I made a set of 8 backup CD's for all my personal data. I really need that DVD-R burner or an external hard drive! I also ran several disk utilities to clean up the registry, check the disk for errors then defragged it. The last thing I did was to create a restore point just before installing Q2006 Premier.

The installation went smoothly, with the program downloading an upgrade from release 1 to release 4 without incident. It then had me convert my 03 files to the new format and saved a copy of my old files in a special directory. Of course I already have an archive backup copy of these files on CD & ZIP disk.

The installation & file conversion went smoothly and everything appears to be correct and it only cost me a little time and less than $25. Hopefully I am set for another 3 years.

Kurt