Wives 1.0

Last year a friend of mine upgraded Girlfriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications. He is also noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-processes which are further consuming valuable resources. What’s more there is no chance of upgrading Car 2.5 to the faster running version Car 3.0.

No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product literature 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 such 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 PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before). At installation, Wife 1.0 automatically installs undesired Plug-ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release, (frequently unemployable for any useful purpose).

As a consequence 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.
• Minimise button and an
• install shield feature that allows Wife 2.0 to be installed with the option to uninstall at anytime without 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 have greater use. I myself decided to avoid all 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 over 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 use of the I/O port. You think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make things worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn’t work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system.

Another annoying problem with all versions of Girlfriend is that it continually pops up 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 executing a self - uninstallation. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient system resources.

BUG WORK-ARROUNDS

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.