SATICHE - 0664

GIRLFRIEND 6.0

Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 6.0 (marketing name Fianceé 1.0) to Wife 1.0 and found that it's 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, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). At installation, Wife 1.0 automatically installs undesired plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. As a consequence 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
Minimize button
An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime 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 have greater use.

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 think they would have fixed such a 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 annoying problem -- all versions of Girlfriend continually popup annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0, and they are also totally "object oriented" and only support hardware with gold plated contacts.

***** 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 executing a self - uninstallation. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient system resources.

*** BUG WORK-AROUNDS *************** 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.