I’m just being careful……… As 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 initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. Some applications such as GameNite 6.3 , Bachelor Party 2.5, and Pubnite 5.0 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 unless you run the Chinese version on a foreign system. 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 loss of other system resources.
– An option to run the network driver in “promiscuous mode” allowing the the system’s Hardware Probe feature to be much more useful/effective.

He wished he had decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 3.0 Even here, however, he has 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 friends have told me that this is a long-standing problem that he should have been aware of. Guess that explains what happened to his version 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!

My friend also was troubled with the following bug:

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 make sure that those systems never share any data over the network. It’s best to install Mistress 1.1 on a completely stand alone system.