........ Like most people who communicate frequently via the Internet, I receive more than my share of humorous anecdotes, most of which are best not reprinted on these pages. Every once in a while, however, I come across one that begs to be shared with others. Regrettably, I do not know the author of this piece of fiction; I will, however, pass it on with my admiration for his creativity. I'm sure my female readers will also realize that my assumption of a male author was based primarily on the content and tone of the story. Here goes........

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

........Wife 1.0 also installs itself so that it is always launched at system initialization, allowing it to monitor all other system activity. In addition some applications, such as Poker Night 10.3, Bachelor Party 2.5 and Pub Night 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, causing the system to lock up when launched (even though these applications worked fine before).

........ Particularly annoying is the fact that Wife 1.0 provides no custom setup options, therefore the installation of undesired plug-ins such as Mother-In-Law 55.8 and Sister-In-Law Beta is unavoidable. System performance also seems to diminish with each passing day.

........ Some features that would be welcome in upcoming Wife 2.0 are:

• "Don't Remind Me Again" Button
• "Minimize" Button
• Install shield feature that allows installation of Wife 2.0 with the option to uninstall at any time without loss of Cache and other system resources.
• Option to run the network driver in "promiscuous mode", thus allowing the system's Hardware Probe feature to be used more frequently.

........ 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 had encountered many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 4.0 over Girlfriend 3.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 3.0 first, otherwise the two versions of Girlfriend will have serious 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. 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 repeatedly flash annoying little messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0.

........ 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 all MS Money files before initiating the uninstall process itself. Then for some reason Mistress won't install at all, claiming insufficient resources. To avoid the aforementioned bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer (such as Laplink) between the two systems.

........Choose your software carefully!

© 1997All Rights Reserved
Frank Dionne
573 Westminster Hill Rd.
Fitchburg, MA 01420
Phone: (978)342-9059
Fax: (978)342-9061
E-Mail: frank.dionne@verizon.net