BEWARE OF THIS SOFTWARE

BEWARE OF THIS SOFTWARE

Date: Fri, 24 Apr 1998 11:56:54 -0500

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 these 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 Mother-In-Law 55.8 and Brother-In-Law 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.

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 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 1.0 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 1.0 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.

As a co-worker of mine said, "This is a good argument for installing Monk v. 1.5."