Wife 1.0

Wife 1.0

Last year 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. 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 Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 5.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day. The features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0 include:

• 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 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 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 thing that sucks -- all versions of Girlfriend continually pop-up 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 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.

The only thing I would add to this is that if you search carefully, you can find one of the extremely rare Mistress 1.1a versions, which knows that Wife applications are running with priority, and which runs under cloaking, with no interest or attempts to upgrade itself to a Wife application.

Last year, I upgraded my GirlFriend 3.1 to GirlFriendPlus 1.0 (marketing name: Fiancee 1.0). Recently I upgraded Fiancee 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and it's a memory hogger, it has taken all my space; and Wife 1.0 must be running before I can do anything.

Although I did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw and BrotherInLaw. Some features I'd like to see in the Upcoming GirlFriend 4.0...

• A "Don't remind me again" button
• Minimize button
• Shutdown feature
• An install shield feature so that Girlfriend 4.0 can be completely uninstalled if so desired (so you don't lose cache and other objects)

I tried running girlfriend 2.0 with girlfriend 1.0 still installed, they tried using the same i/o port and conflicted. Then I tried to unistall girlfriend 1.0 but it didn't have an uninstall program. I tried to uninstall it by hand, but it put files in my system directory. Another thing that sucks in all versions of girlfriend that I've used is that it is totally "object orientated and only supports 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 doing the uninstall itself. Then mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

One or two other undocumented points that should be included to the info above. Before installing any version of GirlFriend do perform a virus check, don't simply look for high level bugs. This is particularly important with public domain versions. Should a virus be found send the version back to where you got it, don't try a quick demo (where available), don't pass it on to a friend!

Once GirlFriend is successfully installed do ensure that you are in protected mode when using the Joystick port and not in real mode otherwise sooner or later you'll get an unrecoverable error. If this occurs you should consider a fast upgrade to Wife but of course you'll lose the nice Plug and Play features you were used to. An upgrade to the original Version 1.0 (Lite) with it's relatively low drain on resources won't be possible after such an error, you'll need a later (higher cost) release of Wife where the interrupt problems still haven't been solved.

If you already have a version of Wife installed then you won't get a license to upgrade GirlFriend. You can try full multitasking but there's a risk of timing conflicts which results in a fatal error and then everything that was running smoothly will be terminated. Change your URL and keep it confidential then reformat (preferably in another Country).