Just recently a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 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. Thus, he's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run on the system at all, crashing the system when selected.

At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as Mother-In-Law 55.8 and Brother-In-Law 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. Minimize button Uninstall feature (without loss, address files & other system resources. Which allows the systems hardware probe feature to be much more useful.) To avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 stick with Girlfriend 2.0. However, the following applies:

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 you should have been aware of.)

The versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of 1 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 1 well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. oAnother thing that sucks -- all versions of Girlfriend 1 continually popup annoying little 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 performing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient 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 accidently be downloaded from the UseNet.

Software Warning! Girlfriend 1.0

I'm currently running the latest version of GirlFriend and I've been having some problems lately. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the GirlFriend releases I've tried have always conflicted with it.

I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if GirlFriend is run in background mode and the sound is turned off. But I'm embarrassed to say I can't find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately, and it works okay.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem co-existing with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility.

I probably should have stayed with GirlFriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance from GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GirlFriend 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run GirlFriend 2.0, and eventually it would require a Token Ring to run properly. He was right - as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.

Shortly after that, I installed GirlFriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus anyway. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while.

I very cautiously upgraded to GirlFriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system.

I tried running GirlFriend 1.0 again with GirlFriend 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 has a feature I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of GirlFriend and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions.

The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of GirlFriend, it is written in some obscure language I can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I've never liked how GirlFriend is totally "object-oriented."

A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. So he did, but soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a huge resource hog.

It has taken up all his space, so he can't load anything else.

One of the primary reasons he decided to go with Wife 1.0 was because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus.

Well, it turns out the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreeSexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins he wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. Although he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw which has an automatic pop-up feature he can't turn off.

I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway because of insufficient resources.