General Asylum

Posted by Steven R. Rochlin (R) on March 07, 2003 at 16:02:03

In Reply to: Marriage is a lovely institution - but who wants to live in an institution? posted by chris.redmond2@bushinternet.com on March 07, 2003 at 13:03:55:

Never been married, no kids.. and now on with the subject at hand...

Last year, my friend upgraded his GirlFriend3.1 to GirlFriendPlus1.0 (marketing name: Fiancee1.0).
Recently he upgraded Fiancee1.0 to Wife1.0 and it's a memory hogger, has taken all his space; and Wife1.0 must be running before he can do anything.

Although he didn't ask for them, Wife1.0 came with Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw and BrotherInLaw.

Some features I'd like to see in the upcoming GirlFriend4.0.

A "Don't remind me again" button
Minimize button
Shutdown feature - An install shield feature so that Girlfriend4.0 can be completely uninstalled if so desired (so you don't lose cache and other objects)
I tried running Girlfriend 2.0 with Girlfriend 1.0 still installed, they tried using the same I/O port and conflicted. Then I tried to uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 but it didn't have an uninstall program. I tried to uninstall it by hand, but it put files in my system directory.
Another thing that sucks -- in all versions of Girlfriend that I've used is that it is totally "object oriented" and only supports hardware with gold plated contacts.

***** 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. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.

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[Editor's Note: I got this from a different source, but since it's related I've appended it here.]
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 Token Ring 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 4.0. 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 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 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 reprogram. 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 totally "object-oriented." A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 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 withWife 1.0 was because it came bundled with FreeSexPlus. Well, it turns out 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 came with MotherInLaw 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 heard 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 anyway because of insufficient resources.

Enjoy the Music,

Steven R. Rochlin