Product review: GirlFriend 1.0/Wife 1.0

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it is a memory hog which leaves very little system resources available for other applications.

He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is spawning processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that it 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 boot where it can monitor all other system activity. The end user is constantly reminded of insufficient memory, lack of support files, and demands that the user only interface with other programs chosen by Wife 1.0. He's finding that some applications such as: PokerNight 10.3, PissUp 2.5, and PubNight 7.1 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 omission of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release.

Also, Wife 1.0 's performance seems to diminish with each passing day, allowing fewer sessions of data transfer, yet complaining about the lack there of.

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

1. A "Don't remind me again" button.
2. Minimize button.
3. A Mute button for all audio capabilities.
4. 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.
5. An option to run the network driver in promiscuous mode which would allow unrestricted access to all I/O ports of the associated hardware.

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 at the same time as 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. Also, the versions of GirlFriend have conflicts over shared use of any I/O ports. You'd think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for GirlFriend 1.0 doesnt work very well and leaves undesirable traces of the application in the system, which often conflict with any future installations of GF. Another problem is that 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. In addition, Wife 1.0 rarely does a full uninstall, instead converting to a highly annoying bug called XWife 1.0, continually demanding a portion of all available resources. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient system support.

***** 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. Always scan your hard drive after interfacing with Mistress 1.x for any traces of data transfer, prior to accessing Wife 1.x. Also, beware of similar shareware applications such as 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 Net.