Marital Software Tips
Last year a friend of mine upgraded Girlfriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's now
a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications.
He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes which are
further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was
included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have
informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.
Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system
initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some
applications such as PokerNight 10.3, Beerbash 2.5, and Pubnight 7.0 are no longer
able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they
always worked fine before).
At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired plugins
such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance
seems to diminish with each passing day.
Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0
- A "Don't remind me again" button.
- A Minimize button.
- An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at any time without the loss of cache and other system resources.
- An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow the systems hardware probe feature to be much more useful.
I myself decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking
with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot
install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first.
Other users say this is a long standing bug which I should have been aware of.
Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port.
You'd think they would have fixed that stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the
uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces
of the application in the system.
Another thing that sucks - all versions of Girlfriend continually popup little annoying
messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.
******* BUG WARNING *******
Wife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before
uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall
itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient system resources.
******* BUG WORKAROUNDS ********
To avoid the above bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run
any file transfer applications such as Laplink 6.0. Also, beware of similar shareware
applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0. Another
solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via a Usenet provider under an anonymous name.
Here again, beware of the viruses which can accidentally be downloaded from the
Usenet.