IT Support

[buvenbee-hind]

Dear IT Support,

Eighteen months ago I upgraded to Girlfriend 1.0 from Drinking Mates 4.2 which I'd used for years without any trouble. However, there are apparently conflicts between these two products and the only solution was to try and run Girlfriend 1.0 with the sound turned off.

To make matters worse, Girlfriend 1.0 is also incompatible with several other applications, such as Lads Night Out 3.1, Football 2 and Playboy 6. Successive versions of Girlfriend proved no better.

A shareware beta-programme, Party Girl 2.1, which I tried, had many bugs and left a virus in my system, forcing me to shut down completely for several weeks. Eventually I tried to run Girlfriend 1.2 and Girlfriend 1.0 at the same time, only to discover that when these two systems detected. .each other they caused severe damage to my hardware.

Sensing a way out, I then upgraded to Fiancé 1.0 only to discover that this product soon had to be upgraded (at great cost) to Wife 1.0, which I reluctantly agreed to because, whilst Wife 1.0 tends to use up all my available resources, it does come bundled with FreeSex Plus and Cleanhouse 2000. Shortly after this upgrade however I then discovered that Wife 1.0 can be very unstable and costly to run. For example, any mistakes I made were automatically stored in Wife 1.0's memory and could not be deleted.. .They then resurfaced months later when I had forgot about them.

Wife 1.0 also has an automatic Diary Explorer and E-mail porn filter, and can, without warning, launch Photostrop and Whingezip! These latter products have no help files and I have to try and guess what the problem is myself. Additional costly problems are that Wife 1.0 needs updating regularly, requiring Shoe Shop Browser for new attachments and also Hairstyle Express which needs to be reinstalled every other week. Wife 1.0 also spawns unwelcome child. .processes that also drains my resources. It also conflicted with some of the new games I wanted to try, stating that they are an illegal operation.

When Wife 1.0 attaches itself to my Audi TT programme it often crashes or runs the system dry. Wife 1.0 also has a rather annoying pop-up called Mother-in-Law, which can't be turned off. Recently I've attempted to try Mistress 2000, but there could be problems. A friend has alerted me to the. .fact that if Wife 1.0 detects the presence of Mistress 2000 it tends to delete all my MS Money files before un-installing itself.

buvenbee-hind

[fradu]

Very Very Good :)

Mark

[Gen. Bombdabastards]

Me thinks you need a bigger Hard Drive and make sure it doesn't become a floppy!!! If this fails use Ctrl Alt Delete, unplug and consider buying a new one. The Japanese make them smaller, cheaper and faster.

Nice One!

[Spur Lash]

Here we go. This is the original one, with the follow up afterwards. After this one, that is????

Dear Technical Support,. .I'm currently running the latest version of GIRLFRIEND and I've been having some problems lately. I've been running the same version of DRINKINGBUDDIES 1.0 forever as my primary application, and all the GIRLFRIEND releases I've tried have always conflicted with it. I hear that DRINKINGBUDDIES won't crash if GIRLFRIEND is run in background mode and the sound is turned off. But I'm embarrassed to say I can't find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately, and it works okay.

GIRLFRIEND also seems to have a problem co-existing with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility. I probably should have stayed with GIRLFRIEND 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance from GIRLFRIEND 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GIRLFRIEND 2.0. He said I probably didn't have enough cache to run GIRLFRIEND 2.0, and eventually it would require a TokenRing to run properly. He was right - as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.

Shortly after that, I installed GIRLFRIEND 3.0 Beta. All the bugs were. .supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it, it gave me a virus anyway. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while. I very cautiously upgraded to GIRLFRIEND 3.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first, and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GIRLFRIEND 1.0 was still in my system. I tried running GIRLFRIEND 1.0 again with GIRLFRIEND 3.0 still installed, but GIRLFRIEND 3.0 has a feature I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of GIRLFRIEND and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions.

The version I have now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of GIRLFRIEND, it is written in some obscure language I can't understand, much less re-program. Frankly, I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I've never liked how GIRLFRIEND is so completely object-oriented.

A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GIRLFRIEND to GIRLFRIEND Plus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GIRLFRIEND. He discovered that GIRLFRIEND Plus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to FIANCÉE 1.0. So he did, but soon after that he had to upgrade to WIFE 1.0, which he describes as a huge resource hog. It has taken up all his space, so he can't load anything else. One of the primary reasons he decided to go with WIFE 1.0 was because it came bundled with FREESEXPLUS.

Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of WIFE 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FREESEXPLUS, particularly the new Plug-ins he wanted to try.

. .On top of that, WIFE 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything. Although he did not ask for it, WIFE 1.0 also came with MOTHERINLAW 1.0, which has an automatic pop-up feature he can't turn off. I told him to try installing MISTRESS 1.0, but he said he'd heard that if you try to run it without first uninstalling WIFE 1.0, WIFE 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then MISTRESS 1.0 won't install in its place because of insufficient resources.

What do you suggest? Is there a bug-free version of GIRLFRIEND?

This is the follow up.

DON'T DO IT !!!

UPGRADE TO WIFE 1.0

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from Girlfriend 4.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving few system resources for other applications. He is also now noticing the Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child-processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomenon was included in the product documentation, though other users have informed me that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.

Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialisation where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as PokerNite 10.3 , Bachelor Party 2.5, and Pubnite 7.0 are no longer able to run on the system at all, causing the system to lockup when launched (even though the apps worked fine before).

Wife 1.0 provides no installation options. Thus, the installation of undesired plug-ins such as Mother-in-law 55.8 and the Brother-in-law Beta is unavoidable. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.

Some features my friend would like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0: . . A "don't remind me again" button. . . Minimize button. . . Ability to delete the "headache" file . . An install feature that provides an option to uninstall 2.0 version without loss of other system resources. . . An option to run the network driver in "promiscuous mode" allowing the system's Hardware Probe feature to be much more useful/effective.

I myself wish I had decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 3.0 Even here, however, I have found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 4.0 on top of Girlfriend 3.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first, otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. Other users have told me that this is a long-standing problem that I should have been aware of. Guess that explains what happened to versions 1 and 2.

To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 3.0 doesn't work very well, leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another identified problem is that all versions of Girlfriend have annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0!

VIRUS ALERT

All users should be aware that 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. Once that happens, Mistress 1.1 won't install and you will get an "insufficient resources" error message. To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and " never", run any file transfer applications(such as Laplink) between the two systems. . .FYI: Don't even think about a shared directory!!!!!!!!!

[Dan Winterland]

A friend of mine recently started using Wife 3.o. Not an ideal solution as it appears that versions 1 and 2 still use a great deal of system resources.