aren't they just utilities and entertainment programs?

[Spartacus]

Wife 1.0 Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving very little system resources available for other applications. He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also 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). During installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins 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 Minimize button An install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 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 system's hardware probe feature to be much more useful.

I myself decided to avoid 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 that I should have known about. Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conficts 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 -- 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 resources. BUG WORK-AROUNDS: To avoid this 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.

 

[Spartacus]

and while we are in Utah

I read the Letter about the Girlfriend upgrade with much interest... I too have used this product through several versions... These are my ratings over the years...

I began the process way back with Girlfriend 1.0. There were many of my friends who told me all of the interesting things Girlfriend 1.0 could do, so I bowed to peer pressure and got my own copy. After installing it into my system however, I noticed several incompatibility problems and shortly after starting to use it I had to uninstall it...

It took a little time and some soul searching but I finally decided to give Girlfriend 2.0 a shot. Things seemed to be running pretty smoothly with it so I decided to do the 2.1 upgrade... No sooner had I done that than BAM Fiancée 1.0 installed... I was somewhat taken aback, but I hid my doubts and soon the system was working fine again... So good that I decided to get Wife 1.0.... After a few months of Wife 1.0 however I began to notice certain environment errors creeping into the system and the In-laws Plug-in seemed at fault, but I could not uninstall it... Eventually the Environment incompatibilities became so intense as to force removal of the software from my system...

Then out came version Girlfriend 3.0... The bugs in earlier versions had supposedly been fixed, so I again entered the fray and installed it. It seemed to run alright for a while, then one day the software simply Uninstalled itself.. I was confused but was told by the company that Girlfriend 4.0 was available, so I upgraded to that... Suddenly however, Version 3.0 reasserted itself into the system and destroyed the directory structure that had been created by Version 4.0 ... I was taken aback.... But from that point on 3.0 seemed to work quite well and when the Girlfriend 3.1 version came out I installed it. It immediately took control and upgraded itself to Fiancée 2.0 and shortly after that I had wife 2.0 on the system... Wife 2.0 soon spawned a child process and began to occupy more and more system resources... Partytime 1.0 was seriously curtailed and Wife 2.0 even took over Quicken 4.0 ... I was in a panic... There seemed nothing I could do... Then a friend sent me a bootleg copy of Mistress 1.0... I was sure this was a bad idea, but I installed it into the system anyway.... Soon my system had reached a critical condition... The registry files began to fragment... And at one point Wife 2.0 and Mistress 1.0 were vying for the same resources... Shortly thereafter I discovered that BOTH Wife 2.0 and Mistress 1.0 had spawned Child processes. Wife 2.0 asserted dominance at this point and deleted the Mistress 1.0 directory. After that... For a time Wife 2.0 seemed to function with only occasional references to errors in the Mistress 1.0 kernal...

Suddenly however, Out of the blue, Wife 2.0 removed itself from the system and the only traces left was Childsupport 1.0 . There was a major system crash which required a full reinstall of the operating system. I tried Reinstalling wife 2.0 but it simply re-loaded the Childsupport Plugin and failed the install...

After this... I thought long and hard about installing any future Girlfriend versions...

I did an upgrade of my system and installed several extended drivers designed to make interfacing with the Girlfriend series more error free... Then, Version 5.0 came out... I decided to try it, but I only installed the Minimum configuration so I could get out of it quickly if necessary... It seemed stable enough for a time, until Girlfriend 6.0 came out. I quickly installed Girlfriend 6.0 and then remembered to Uninstall Version 5.0... I wasn't sure how this would go, but that was the order of things and it seems to have worked out....

Girlfriend 6.0 was different than previous versions, and the user interface was much easier to communicate with... and it wasn't long till I was confident enough to go to the Girlfriend 6.1 upgrade then Fiancée 3.0....Shortly before Upgrading to Wife 3.0 I discovered that in the communications options there was a feature that allowed other versions of Girlfriend to operate as Plug-ins to the main system... I was intrigued. I made the appropriate requests to the Fiancée 3.0 program and was shortly able to install another copy of Girlfriend as Plug-in 1.0... Shortly after that, I upgraded to Wife 3.0 and for the next while all was well... Operating System, Wife 3.0, Girlfriend Plug-in 1.0 all seemed to flow smoothly... So I Installed Girlfriend Plug-in 2.0 into the system. IMMEDIATELY Plug-in 1.0 crashed and uninstalled... A communication error I later determined was at fault, but attempting to reinstall Plug-in 1.0 failed. Shortly thereafter the Plug-in 2.0 seemed to become unstable and communication errors seemed to increase in frequency.

Wife 3.0 remained stable during the entire plug in debacle... I soon decided to remove all traces of the Plug-ins from the System Registry, and installed Girlfriend Plug-in 3.0. This plug-in seemed better able to communicate with both the operating system AND the Wife 3.0 overlay than the previous versions.

At the time of this writing the company has determined that Wife 3.0 and Wife 4.0 versions can be made to operate in the same environment, though it might require installing the UTAH file allocation system. It has been tested in other file systems but the results have been mixed.

Currently I am continuing to run Wife 3.0, Plug-in 3.0 (with a Wife 4.0 concurrent upgrade possible) And even find that Party-time1.5 works, as well as all other software I have experimented with in the system.

I have no plans to change to the UTAH Allocation System, and am watching carefully the changes that will allow a concurrent implementation to function otherwise.. I shall keep you informed.