Beware The Wife Upgrade...

[Harry Palmer]

UPGRADE WARNING:

Be aware of the following software problems before purchasing:

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,

PubNight 2.5, and CigarBar 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 55.8 and SisterInLaw 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:

- 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 1.1 via a UseNet provider under an

anonymous name. Here again, beware of the viruses which can accidentally be

downloaded from the UseNet.