Pros and Cons of Marriage

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 spawning Child processes which are further consuming valuable resources.

No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or 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 in such a way that it is always launched at system initialisation, where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5 and PubCrawl 7.0 are no longer able to run 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 installtion of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also system performance seems to have diminished with each passing day.

Some features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0

A "Don't Remind Me Again" switch
Minimize button
An install shield that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at any time 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 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 conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You'd 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 pop up 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 doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install claiming insufficient resources.

***** BUG WORK-AROUND *****

To avoid this problem try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system without any network connections to the original (especially LapLink 6.0). Also beware of similar shareware applications that have been know to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0